by Pat Frank
He wondered whether he should call her. She would know, by now, that the missing bombers were out of the 519th and he doubted that the names of the crews had yet been released. In that case she would be very worried. Worry wasn’t the right word. There is no torture like uncertainty.
He dialled her number and she answered instantly, as if she had been sitting by the phone, poised to pounce at its ring. She said, “Yes?” Her voice was strained.
“Katy? Jess.”
“Yes?”
He sensed her fear and phrased his words carefully. “It’s all right, Katy. Everything’s all right. Your brother didn’t go in. He wasn’t on the list.”
He could hear the choked sob. She said, “I was so scared!”
He said, “I still am.”
three
AMONG THE passengers who landed at Havana Airport Tuesday morning was Robert Gumol. December was a tourist month, but it was obvious that he had come on business. He wore a blue suit of expensive texture, cannily cut to minimize his girth, and he carried a heavy brief case. He bustled down the ramp of the DC-8, and shouldered his way to the front of the line of those moving into the air terminal from Gate 7. At the gate an olive-skinned girl wearing a chic, powder-blue uniform was serving Bacardi cocktails, free. It was not yet ten o’clock, and most of the others refused, but Gumol accepted one and drank it at a gulp. Although it was not unseasonably warm, a rivulet of sweat ran from his sparse, crinkled sideburns, and overflowed the fatty canyons in his neck. His stiff white collar was collapsed and sodden. A lush, the girl thought, getting drunk before breakfast. The truth was that Gumol was quite nervous.
Ordinarily he was the most careful and methodical of men, but now he wondered whether he might have forgotten something. There is always a certain hazard in bringing a large amount of cash into a foreign country. His passport, which he always kept up to date and in the top drawer of his desk, was no worry. Cuba required no visas from North Americans. But if your luggage consists solely of a brief case, a certain curiosity is invited. Customs, finding a stack of cash and noting that he was a banker, might jump to a faulty conclusion, and tip off the American authorities in hope of a reward. The bank examiners would find everything correct in Upper Hyannis, but Treasury agents might inquire about the taxes on such a large sum of money. But even as he considered the hazard, Gumol thought of a way to avoid it. If an explanation was necessary, he would tell Customs that the money was for deposit in the Bank of Cuba to finance a certain transaction in which higher officials of their government were interested. That would grease his way, quickly. Gumol was satisfied. The rum glowed within him, and he took his place in the line waiting for inspection.
The line edged ahead. Immigration glanced at his passport and asked, casually, how long he expected to stay.
“Only a few days,” Gumol said.
“You’re a banker. Business, I suppose?”
“Yes, business.” He saw that Customs, a thin, mustached man standing at the table beyond Immigration, was listening.
He moved on. To his relief, Customs didn’t reach out for the brief case. Customs said, “Go right ahead, sir. Taxis are across the lobby.” The little fat man, Customs thought, is uneasy because his brief case is stuffed with money. He wants to get the dollars to the bank in a hurry. He thinks that if I force him to open the brief case someone will see the money, and he will be robbed, and indeed he might be. It is best, therefore, that the brief case not be opened at this counter. Cuba didn’t care how much money Americans brought into the country, so long as a portion of it remained.
Once in a cab, Gumol did indeed consider taking the money to the bank, but decided against it. That might be dangerous. Banks, even in Cuba, listed and reported the serial numbers of thousand dollar bills. In time Treasury might inquire about the source of his cash. Havana was the center of money exchange in the Caribbean. In Havana were certain traders who would accept currency, of any denomination, without question or remembrance so long as there was a profit in it. These traders avoided the authorities, and it would be safe to deal with them. They would enable him to diversify his assets. He would buy Argentine and Mexican pesos, quietly and slowly. After a successful attack on the United States, what would dollars be worth? Until he got rid of his dollars, he would stay married to this brief case.
At the Hotel Nacional it was unnecessary for Gumol to show his credit cards. He was remembered. He registered, and was escorted to a double room overlooking the harbor. When the bellhop was gone he took off his clothes and fell on the bed, much relieved. He had made it, with ease and safety, and he felt he was entitled to another drink. He picked up the phone, ordered rum, ice, and Cokes, and remembered that he ought to telegraph his wife and inform her that he had arrived safely. Then he decided not to wire her. She could wait. If she worried, it served her right. Let her sweat a while. The rum came and he mixed a drink and walked out on the balcony. On a similar balcony, one floor below, two girls were standing in the sunshine, their hands on the white-painted iron railing, chatting. One of them, a yellow-haired girl with bright black eyes and dark brows boldly painted, looked up at him and smiled. He raised his glass in a silent toast, and invitation.
2
At the same time that Gumol landed in Havana, PFC Henry Hazen, wearing the smart green of the Marines, arrived in Jacksonville from the West Coast, and then caught a bus to St. Augustine. He had three weeks’ leave, which would extend through the holiday season, before shipping out to Okinawa, and he was on the way to visit his family and see Nina Pope, who had been his girl. Whether she was still his girl was unclear. Her letters had arrived with less and less frequency, and their language was stilted and vague. Eighteen months in the Marines had changed Henry. He had gained twenty-five pounds, his chest filled his uniform jacket, and his legs no longer resembled those of a wobbly colt. Anyone who survives the Corps’ boot camp and combat training course grows quickly to manhood.
Among the realities Hazen had absorbed was that you didn’t join the Marines to learn a trade, in spite of what the recruiting posters said and his family believed. Marines were trained for other things, such as fighting a dangerous and wily enemy. At Pendleton he had been taught the nature of this enemy, and thereafter he brooded often on what he had seen, and what he had failed to do, on a moonlit night in June the year before.
He could not banish it from his mind. He had to tell someone.
The leader of his training platoon, at Pendleton, was a Sergeant Asbury, a onetime professional football player who might have made second string on the Redskins had not the Korean War intervened. At first Asbury had seemed formidable, tough and distant, but after a few weeks Hazen learned that Asbury, when you grew to know him, was human and friendly, like a high school athletic coach. So it was to Asbury that Hazen had confided his story of the submarine. Asbury listened without interruption until Henry came to the part about the Buick rolling off the landing barge. Then Asbury laughed and said, “Sure it was a Buick, Slim?”
“I’m almost certain it was a Buick.”
“Come on, Slim, don’t try to snow me. You’re making this up as you go along, aren’t you?”
“No, this is honest-to-goodness truth. Somebody ought to know about it.”
“Well, why tell me? What can I do?”
“I don’t know.”
“You really saw this?”
“I saw it.”
Asbury looked worried. Maybe the boy had seen a submarine, maybe he hadn’t. Anyway, he thought he had, but he also thought he had seen a car delivered by landing barge, and of course that was ridiculous. Besides, it had all happened more than a year before, and nothing could be done about it now. Asbury had been in the Marines long enough to realize how much trouble a tale like that could cause, if bucked to higher authority and taken seriously. “Know what I’d do if I were you, Slim?” he said. “I’d forget all about it.”
“Forget it? Why?”
“I’ll tell you why,” the sergeant said. “Suppose
I take this up with the Captain? Whether he believes you or not, he personally can’t do a thing. He has to buck it to the battalion commander. So what does the Major do? He doesn’t know you, and it sounds real screwy to him. Does he take your word for it and go to the big brass and risk getting laughed at? No, sir. He calls in the post psychiatrist. The psychiatrist talks to you and nods, yes, yes. Then he puts you under observation for two weeks. If you’re still sane after two weeks in the crazy ward, he certifies that you were suffering from a temporary delusion. He says you’ve got an inferiority complex and you were trying to compensate for it by inventing this story to call attention to yourself. So he sends you back to the platoon with a note on your jacket saying you’re emotionally immature and unstable. After that, you’ll never even make corporal. Now, still want to see the Captain?”
Henry knew that Asbury’s reasoning was logical and accurate. It could even be worse. They might kick him out of the Corps with a medical discharge, and after that it would be tough getting a job, any kind of a job, on the outside. He said, “No, don’t tell the Captain. Don’t tell anybody, will you?”
“Okay, Slim,” the sergeant had said. “We’ll just keep it quiet.”
Now, on the bus to St. Augustine, so close to where it had happened, his conscience troubled him again.
3
The alarm clock jolted Katharine out of bed at six-thirty that morning, an hour earlier than usual. She zigzagged into the bathroom, splashed cold water on her face, and the cocoon of sleep began to unravel. She recalled that she had been up until two trying to get her brother, Clint, on the telephone. Sometimes the long distance operator had penetrated as deeply as Orlando, more often she could not get beyond Jacksonville, and she had never reached the switchboard at Hibiscus. All the lines into the base were always busy. She had also tried to call Anne, Clint’s girl in Baltimore, but Anne’s line had been tied up too, and this gave Katharine a clue to what was occurring.
Now Katharine turned on the radio, set water to boiling for coffee and eggs, and tried Hibiscus again. She still couldn’t get through. Official traffic would be heavy, of course, but that wasn’t all. There are usually forty crews for the thirty aircraft of a heavy bomber wing, and seven men to a crew. That meant there were two hundred and eighty families competing with each other, and with government and factory priority calls, to learn whether their sons were still alive. Not only families. The flyers’ girls, like Anne in Baltimore, would be competing also. Katharine wondered what happened to communications in a really big disaster—something bigger than two bombers missing—when the names of the lost were unknown.
She called Anne again in Baltimore and reached her this time and told her that Clint was all right. As she suspected, Anne, too, had been up most of the night, and had a call in for Hibiscus.
Katharine reached the conference room at seven-fifty and set the coffee-maker going, her natural chore as the only woman in the group. In a few minutes they began to drift in. All except Raoul looked weary. She had never seen Raoul mussed or unshaven. Jess looked as if he had slept in his uniform, and she said so.
“I did,” Jesse said. “Fell asleep in the office with my feet on the desk. Now I can hardly bend my knees.”
Simmons arrived exactly at eight. “All right,” he said, “let’s get going. I feel this is going to be a long, tough day. I’ve got something hot, but I want to save it for last because I’m sure, from your looks, that you all must have something hot too. Let’s start with AEC.” He nodded to Katharine.
“I haven’t got anything hot at all,” Katharine said. “AEC passes to Army.”
Cragey sat at her left, Jess Price at her right where his good eye was on her. Directly across sat Raoul, flanked by Batt and Felix Fromburg.
Cragey’s face was ascetic, his shoulders too thin and frail for the weight of eagles, but when he spoke of military matters it was with a scholars exactitude and authority. He told, first, of the strange withdrawals of the Russian divisions from the frontiers of Western Europe. Then he said:
“We have something out of Hong Kong. Our military attaché there has a friend in Peiping, a merchant. The merchant exports hog bristles to Hong Kong, and he also exports information. In the hog bristles. Don’t ask me how. This merchant, who, incidentally, was an acquaintance during my years in China, and whom I know to be reliable, has a mistress, a most charming girl, really; educated in India. Happen to know her too. She is a linguist, and works as an interpreter in the War Plans Staff of the Chinese People’s Army. The word from Hong Kong is that Peiping planned to invade Formosa early this month, but that the invasion has been called off. This fits in with what Steve told me last night—the massing of junks at Amoy and Tsingkiang, and then suddenly a cessation of activity.”
“I know why,” said Raoul Walback.
“In just a minute, Raoul,” said Simmons. “Let’s tap the military first. How about air, Jess?”
Jesse Price spoke of the heavy reconnaissance in the polar regions, not unprecedented in the years before the era of conciliation and hope, but now unusual.
Batt rose. He told of the thirty missing submarines, and the possible shadowing of the Forrestal. “Now I have a harder fact,” he went on. “We have just heard from our naval attaché in Stockholm. On five December a Swedish patrol vessel sighted a flotilla of twelve submarines passing out through the Skaggerak.”
Batt paused to give them time to consider this statement. Simmons demanded, “Why are we getting this so late?”
“Hard to say,” Batt said. “The Swedish kid commanding the patrol boat probably didn’t think it important. After all, Sweden is worried about the Baltic, not the Atlantic, and the Swedes see Russian subs maneuvering all the time. So he probably just turned in his sighting in a routine way when he got back to port, and it stayed routine until it got to the Navy Ministry and somebody mentioned it to our man in Stockholm. Same sort of thing happens here, you know.”
Katharine’s fingers felt cold and she looked at her hands and saw that the palms were white. Suddenly, she was afraid. It was eerie, the way in which the Russians seemed to be following their plan. It was as if, in childhood, you had scared yourself reading ghost stories which you knew were just stories, and then looked up to see a spook at the window. She started to speak, but decided it was unnecessary. Everyone else was thinking the same thing. She could read it in the stone set of their faces.
Simmons asked a question, the words tiptoeing carefully down the table. “Assuming that the submarine flotilla is headed from the Skaggerak towards our Gulf ports—as our forecast calls for it to do—how soon, Commander Batt, would they reach their target areas?”
Steve Batt leaned back in his chair, staring at the ceiling, and did his computations half aloud. “I’ll give them seventeen knots on the surface, nights, and eleven knots submerged during daylight hours, and they’ll have fifteen hours of darkness, average, each day. I’ll move them west just south of Iceland to thirty degrees, west; then due south; then west again.” His lips moved soundlessly and his eyes closed as he calculated the navigation problem. He said: “They should be in firing position by twenty-four December—certainly not later than the twenty-fifth. You understand it’s only a guess. This isn’t the chartroom in Leningrad.”
So they would know, for sure, within the week. Simmons said, “What has CIA got?”
“Hold your hats,” Raoul said. “We are presently entertaining in our Vienna office a most unusual guest. Simonov. For years he was a hatchet man for the NKVD, and later for the MVD. Pal of Beria’s, and we had expected his throat would be cut in ’fifty-three when they liquidated his chief. Simonov survived. He may have delivered Beria over to Malenkov and Khrushchev. You never can tell for sure about those things. Anyway, Simonov flew to Vienna recently on some murderous mission for Moscow and promptly came over. Said some sort of ruckus was developing in the Kremlin, and his number was up. The important thing is that he gave a reason for what’s going on in China. Seems that the Chinese wer
e planning to hit Formosa this month, just as we heard from Colonel Cragey. They kept it secret, even from the Russians, until a few weeks ago. The Russians were furious when they found out. Simonov overheard a conversation between two of the deputy premiers and the Chinese ambassador to Moscow. The Russians told the ambassador that an outbreak of war in the Far East would spoil everything. They told him that they were withdrawing all Russian air from the area for use elsewhere, and that if the Chinese insisted on striking they could count on no help. Then one of the deputies patted the ambassador on the shoulder and said, ‘If you’ll just be patient a while longer, you’ll be able to swim to Formosa.’”
“Very interesting,” said Simmons. “It appears that the Chinese decided to be patient. In this same connection, there’s been another schism in the Russian high command. Our ambassador doesn’t know exactly what it is, as yet. For one thing, the big military boys haven’t been seen in public recently. No announced purge, understand. But the men behind the scenes, the Party men, are openly seizing executive power. It is good to keep in mind that the Russian military tradition is to defend the homeland, but the Party’s goal has always been one thing—world revolution and hegemony. This split can mean a purge, or it can be that the marshals are now engaged solely in military matters, and therefore have relinquished all their control in internal affairs.”
“It’s coming all right, isn’t it?” Raoul Walback said, more a statement than a question, and more to himself than to his colleagues.