by Pat Frank
Forty-five minutes later Jesse and Katharine were eating breakfast with Clint Hume. They sat at one end of a long table in the Officers’ Open Mess, while at the other end, carbines in hand, sat two of the lieutenant’s men, steadfastly watching. Jesse began to doubt his conviction that the B-99 that had exploded over the Red River, and the others as well, had been sabotaged. No saboteur could get on a SAC base. Treason? He could imagine one treasonable or demented airman. Three, on three separate bases, seemed beyond the bounds of credibility.
The problem of quarters had been quickly solved. Jesse could squeeze into Clint’s room at the BOQ. Katy could stay, Clint was sure, at the home of Lieutenant-Colonel Gresham, his aircraft commander. On Hibiscus Base married light colonels rated a three-bedroom, two-bath house, since an Air Force survey showed that by the time an officer reached the rank of lieutenant-colonel he usually had at least two children. The Greshams, however, had no children, and therefore had a guest room. Clint was a combination navigator-radarman-bombardier. For the next three days he would be taking a refresher course in new radar—he gave no further explanation—and Katy and Jesse could use his car.
“I’m glad you won’t be flying,” Katharine said.
“Frankly,” said Clint, “so am I. Lots of the boys think the B-Nine-Nine should stand down until the trouble is located and corrected. Oh, we fly when we have to, but nobody likes it.”
“So you’re convinced something’s wrong with the aircraft?” Jesse asked. Clint seemed a serious, thoughtful man, not handsome, who looked over thirty-five, although Jess knew he was thirty-two. Clint lacked Katy’s pyrotechnic quality of mind, but Jess put him down as a solid citizen, his opinion not to be disregarded.
Clint shrugged. “I like the B-Nine-Nine. She does everything you ask her to do. From the first prototype, she was never anything but airworthy. I flew in the prototypes when they were tested at Eglin. But what else can it be? Some part in the aircraft is dying before its time.”
The airman who had served them hovered, a pot of steaming coffee in his hand, near Jesse’s shoulder. He was a stocky, handsome man with wide-set, intelligent gray eyes, and he held his shoulders like a soldier. “More coffee, sir?” he asked.
“Thanks, yes,” Jesse said. When the Air Force was getting men of this caliber as cooks and kitchen helpers, he thought, it couldn’t be treason.
From the kitchen doorway a sergeant called, “Hey, Smith. Time we started on the flight lunches.”
The airman, Smith, filled Jesse’s cup and departed. Jesse and Clint were finishing their second coffee when Colonel Lundstrom, the Chief, Special Investigations, whose command post was in the Pentagon, came into the mess hall. He recognized Jesse and walked towards their table and Jesse rose and introduced Katy, and her brother, and then said, “Colonel, do you mind identifying me so I can get the guns out of my back?”
Lundstrom turned to the Air Police. “I know this officer personally,” he said. “You men can go back to your post.”
“They’re real careful on this base, sir,” Jesse said.
“Apparently not careful enough,” said Lundstrom. The colonel’s eyes were sunken, and he looked as if he had lost ten pounds since Jesse had seen him in the Pentagon a few days before.
2
Airman Smith walked into the kitchen, cleared a wide, wooden, knife-scarred worktable, and began to make sandwiches and pack the flight lunches, his hands sure and adept as those of an assembly line workman who can do his job blind, drunk, or with his thoughts in another continent. Now, at last, he was beginning to comprehend the full implications and importance of his assignment. Snatches of conversation—like that between the two majors—had been informative, and a pattern was forming, subtly taking a new shape, like an optical illusion if you stare at it long enough. The American officers were beginning to grumble and complain, openly. They confessed fear, without shame. He had even heard one say, “Nobody is going to make me go up in one of those streamlined flying coffins.” Yet Smith’s conclusions were not precisely accurate. The Soviet espionage schools could turn out facsimiles of Americans, just as the Zim factory produced a car that looked exactly like a Buick, but the convictions of childhood, imbedded deep in the subconscious, remained Russian. In Russia overt dissatisfaction, rarely if ever voiced, could only be a prelude to revolt. He had no way of knowing that Americans would gripe and growl and shout defiance of authority, and then go ahead and perform their duty. It was Smith’s conclusion that SAC was on the verge of mutiny. He understood that such a mutiny, like that of the Czar’s sailors in the Baltic Fleet in 1917, could be decisive. He resolved to keep on destroying aircraft until SAC cracked. In the catalogue of Soviet heroes, when all was over, his name would be printed bold as Zhukov’s. Greater, even. Zhukov had only succeeded in conquering the Germans. His goal was the acquisition of the world.
Sergeant Ciocci said, “Stan, how many you got finished?”
Smith counted them. “Eighteen.”
“Okay. Make up two more. Five missions today.”
Smith packed two more cartons and Ciocci examined, sealed, and stamped them, and in a few minutes the security detachment from the flight line came in to pick them up. The flight-line lieutenant, looking at his list, said, “Three coffees today.”
Ciocci turned to Smith and said, “Which ones you got filled, Stan?”
“Those on the end,” Smith said, pointing. Ciocci took three thermos bottles from the rack and handed them to the lieutenant’s men. The lieutenant counted the cartons, paid Ciocci with chits, and the lunches were stacked and carried away.
Just before he left the mess hall at eight Smith asked a favor of Ciocci, for now it was necessary to plan ahead. “Sergeant, is it okay if Cusack works for me tonight? I’ll take Cusack’s duty Saturday.” Smith’s roommate was a swing man. He worked three days a week, and two nights, Fridays and Saturdays.
“It’s okay with me if it’s okay with Cusack,” Ciocci said. “You crazy, giving up your long weekend? Oh, I get it. You got another girl?”
Smith winked and said, “Man wasn’t made to be monogamous.”
Ciocci wasn’t exactly sure what the word monogamous meant, but he was sure that Stan did have another girl. For a food handler, that Stan was a smart apple, a smooth character, all right. Stan was no square.
3
At nine, that Thursday morning, Felix Fromburg was received by Albert Osborne, Deputy Chief, Counter-espionage Division, Subversives Branch, Federal Bureau of Investigation. Osborne’s office, on the fifth floor of the Justice Department, overlooked Pennsylvania Avenue. He was standing at the window, looking down at the massed traffic, crawling like two thick, lethargic, mottled snakes, when Felix entered. Osborne pretended not to hear him, and when he turned to his desk he said, curtly, “Be with you in a minute, Fromburg.” He sat down and displayed preoccupation with his mail, while Fromburg stood. In the FBI, as elsewhere, there are feuds and jealousies, and petty men.
Felix Fromburg had been given the job that Osborne wanted.
Contrary to popular belief, counter-espionage is not a glamorous profession. Even for the active operatives, it is tedious and frustrating, for it is more rewarding to keep an enemy agent under surveillance, thereby unravelling the net of which he is but a single strand, than to make a spectacular grab and get your name in the papers. Surveillance means riding the subways and busses, not the trans-Atlantic airliners and Orient Express. It means fidgeting, all day every day for months, in a darkened room, with an Eyemo camera and parabolic mike aimed at a door across the street. It means wasting weeks of waiting for a phone to ring—on a tapped line. And administrative jobs, in CE, are worse. Osborne had been through it all, and when the FBI was asked to furnish an experienced CE man for an interdepartmental conference group to sit in the Pentagon, Osborne badly wanted the post.
Instead, Osborne was elevated to deputy chief of division, which meant more money but was a dead end. Fromburg soared around in the stratosphere of government, privy to h
igh level military plans and policy, while he, Osborne, still grubbed in the cellar of administration. He knew that he was certainly more personable than Fromburg, and probably more efficient as well. Fromburg was somewhat undersized and taciturn and not very aggressive. Osborne doubted that Fromburg’s presence in the Pentagon would enhance the FBI’s prestige.
So Osborne could not help being secretly pleased when he learned that Fromburg’s Intentions Group was in trouble. The story, in somewhat garbled form, had been relayed to him by Ginter, his assistant. Osborne scrawled his initials on the last of the morning’s incoming memos, sighed as if he knew the coming interview would be distasteful, looked up, and said, “I was really very much distressed, Fromburg, to hear about your hassle with the Pentagon.”
“It’s your hassle as well as mine,” Felix said, quietly.
“I don’t think we want any part of it.”
“Now, look,” Felix said, “we’ve had hassles before, but this one is different. That forecast—the one Ginter must have told you about—it’s really vital. It was drawn up partly on the basis of information supplied by your division, and I think you, speaking for the Bureau that is, have a right to blast it out of Clumb’s desk.”
“The right, perhaps, but neither the position nor the inclination. In the first place, as you know, Fromburg, liaison between the Bureau and the Pentagon isn’t on my level. It would be up to the Director, or even the Attorney General.”
“Well, will you take it up with the Director?”
“I will not! Certainly the Pentagon has the utmost faith in General Clumb’s judgment, or he wouldn’t be in the job he holds. I can’t very well recommend to the Director that he challenge the judgment of a very senior officer attached to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, now can I?”
“This isn’t a matter of protocol,” Felix said. “I believe this country is going to be attacked Monday.”
Osborne tapped a pen on his desk, thoughtful. “I won’t say that’s preposterous,” he said, “because we have been attacked without warning before. But I will say that it is most presumptuous of you to try to force your personal opinion upon me, and upon the Bureau, and upon the whole executive branch of government. You have failed to implement your directives. You were instructed to sit in with that group and answer questions when required, and act as their security officer. You aren’t supposed to engage in a crusade, or stick the Bureau’s neck out. Felix, I’m really afraid you’ve compromised your status.”
Felix said, calmly as if asking for the afternoon off, “Does that mean I’m fired? I rather hope so, because it would give me a chance to get my family out of the city before Monday.”
He really believes it, Osborne thought, incredulously. He really believes the Russians are going to start dropping bombs in our laps Monday. Yet firing Fromburg without charges or an investigation was out of the question. After all, there were the Civil Service regulations. But it would be better if Fromburg left Washington, because if he kept on milling around he might get the Bureau into trouble. “Fire you? Don’t be silly,” he said. “Plenty for you to do, and I want to say that Ginter may have been off base when he suggested that a man of your experience and seniority do field security checks. Now, I take it that you’re impressed by the exodus of some of the Russian diplomats and consuls?”
“I am.”
“Frankly, I’m not,” said Osborne. “It could be nothing more than coincidence, or a result of this new shakeup in the Kremlin. So far as I can see, there has been absolutely no change in their main policy, conciliation, non-aggression. Why are you so suspicious?”
“No reason,” said Felix. “I’m no more suspicious than I would be if the Capone mob, or the Jersey syndicate, all started studying to be scoutmasters.”
“You can forget the sarcasm. I just wanted to tell you that I have an assignment along the lines in which you’re interested. That is, people getting out of the country. There’s a Pennsylvania banker, name of Robert Gumol, down in Havana. Claims that he was rolled for three hundred and eighty-five thousand dollars. I want you to go down there.”
“Sounds like a job for Treasury.”
“The bank examiners are working on it,” Osborne said, “but that isn’t the point. His wife—they live in Upper Hyannis—called our agent-in-charge in Philadelphia last night. Said she wanted to report him missing. She hasn’t heard from him since he arrived in Havana and thinks he may have been kidnapped by the Commies. She believes he’s had money dealings with the Commies for years. He and his father both. She used to hear them talking, sometimes.”
“Could be desertion,” said Fromburg. “And yet—” He recalled the Tass man’s flight to Mexico.
“I don’t know what it is,” said Osborne. “Up to you to find out. Ginter will get together the file on this case. Have my girl draw up some travel vouchers. You ought to be able to leave for Havana at, say, three.”
“I’ll be ready,” Fromburg said. The thought of activity was welcome. Anything was better than waiting around, frustrated and helpless, in a vacuum.
That evening, while his wife, Sarah, helped him pack, and the children had come in from play and were monopolizing the bathroom and being unusually confusing and disorganized, he wondered what to do about his family. For fifteen years, in the Fromburg household, sudden trips, never explained until his return and sometimes never explained at all, had been common procedure. Sarah accepted these conditions of his employment, and expected them. He and Sarah had been sweethearts since their childhood together, grandchildren of Jewish immigrants, in a section of Baltimore, little better than a slum, not far from the Pennsylvania station. The white steps in the row of red brick houses on their street were of cheap pine, and were not replaced until rotten and hazardous. In Baltimore white marble steps are respectable, white limestone steps acceptable, and whitewashed pine a certificate of poverty. That they had burst out of this environment into the sunlight of security, comfort, and even luxury that goes with a well-paid government job was always a little wonderful to both of them. At twenty Sarah had been petite and vivacious. As she neared forty her eyes were still bright, but her skin was darkening and wrinkling like a prune. Except to Felix she was not a particularly attractive woman.
Ever since the end of World War II, Fromburg’s duties had become increasingly secretive as he was assigned to the more sensitive areas of counter-espionage. It had been Sarah who had decided that Felix should never tell her anything of his work. “If there should ever be a leak,” she’d said, “you’ll never be worried that it was me.” That’s the way it was, and had always been, but now, even as he realized it was necessary to tell her everything, the habit of secrecy inhibited him. He considered suggesting that she take the children to visit her mother over the holidays, but Baltimore was a primary target also. Sarah had a sister in Pittsburgh. That was just as bad, perhaps worse. Sarah was tucking his white saddle shoes into the corners of the suitcase when he spoke. “I wish to God I could take you and the children to Havana with me, but I can’t.”
She straightened, startled by the calm gravity of his voice. “Take the children away from home at Christmas? Why, sweetheart?”
Felix tried to explain, but the phrases would not form themselves. All he could say was, “Yes, out of Washington on Christmas. Out of Washington before Christmas Eve.” He grabbed her by the shoulders.
“But why in the world—” And then she knew. “Do you mean it, Felix?”
“I mean it.”
“When?”
“I believe on Christmas Eve.”
“Why hasn’t an evacuation been ordered?” Two hours a week, Sarah worked for Civil Defense. Not as a spotter. Glasses couldn’t correct her eyesight, except for reading. All Sarah did was sweep out the Civil Defense shack, far down the river, and keep things neat.
“Because—” he knew the futility of explaining to her the intricacies of government—“because opinion is divided. The big boys don’t believe it. Most of them haven’t even heard of it, and p
robably won’t. Now don’t argue, Sarah. Just trust me. Get the kids out of the city. I don’t know where. Try to find a safe place. You know as much about it as I do.”
She said, “All right, Felix. I’ll take them away in the car Sunday morning. When I find a place I’ll wire you. But where?”
“Care of the consul-general. I’ll have to check in there.”
That’s the way he had left his family. It wasn’t until too late, when he was aboard the night non-stop for Havana, that he began to wish he had told Sarah to follow him to Cuba instead of driving off, with the children and the responsibility, into the unpredictable countryside.
4
General Keatton and Colonel Lundstrom had taken over the base commander’s working space at Hibiscus, and so Brigadier-General Charles Conklin was using his exec’s office when Jesse Price arrived to check in, as courtesy required. An officer without orders does not come to live in somebody else’s bailiwick without making his presence known, particularly when that bailiwick is approximately in a state of siege.
Conklin was only four years older than Jesse, and but for the caprices of two wars their rank might have been identical. In 1943, as lieutenants, they had flown B-24’s to Africa, wingtip to wingtip. Conklin’s curse was a snub-nosed, freckled face that refused to age, and golden hair that refused to gray and insisted on curling no matter how closely cropped. His nickname was Buddy, after Buddy Rogers, the actor who for two generations had managed to remain a juvenile film star. That Buddy Conklin was a brigadier-general at thirty-nine, in spite of these manifest handicaps, attested to his courage as a pilot, his great skill as a tactician, his executive ability, and his luck.