by Pat Frank
He looked up at the clock: 0522. He swung in his chair to call Challon, and Buddy Conklin came into the office, hatless, hair uncombed, no insignia of rank on his open shirt, dripping sweat and with his hands and face smudged with grease. “The damn’ car!” he said. “Sorry it took me so long. Choked gas line. That damn’ car is a lemon.”
Jesse told him what had happened, and what he had done thus far, realizing as he spoke how much authority he had assumed, for an acting executive officer. Even with Lundstrom’s backing, he wondered whether he had gone overboard.
Conklin said, “Good going, Jess. As soon as we hear from the mess hall I want this base out of bed. Condition One alert. Have you told the A-2 to break out the assigned target maps?”
“Damn it, no,” Jesse said. “I forgot.”
“That’s okay. I’ll handle it. We’ll consider the twelve planes of today’s mission as our first striking group. I want the whole Five-Nineteenth Wing to go as a second wave by ten o’clock.” He turned to Challon. “Get my staff in here. No, don’t use those phones. Those are going to be busy.”
6
Except for Ciocci’s inquiry about the reappearing thermos bottles, for Smith the first five hours of his shift had been without event. He was thankful that only one more night of strain lay ahead, assuming he was able to get rid of his three bombs this morning. He was glad that it would soon be over, and he began to wonder about plans for the future. If something big happened Monday, as he expected, he must be careful to avoid the chaos. He wondered, without emotion, what would happen to Betty Jo. He would not see her again unless he discovered he needed the car. At five o’clock he went into the kitchen, ran bread through the slicers, and began making up sandwiches for flight lunches.
Ciocci, taking one of the new men at gin rummy across the meat block, said, “Say, Stan, you’re pretty ambitious, ain’t you? What d’you think we’re going to do? Feed the whole Air Force?”
Smith said, “I heard a couple of officers talking. Twelve missions set up for this morning.”
“Twelve? No fooling. I’ll be with you in a minute.” Ciocci turned back to his hand. A few minutes later the phone rang, and he answered it. It was the flight line. Twelve missions, just like Smith said. The detail from the flight line would be over to pick up the lunches at about six. Ciocci quit the gin rummy game and began preparing the cardboard cartons.
At six o’clock the detail had not yet shown up, but at that time Colonel Lundstrom and Major Glick came into the mess hall, seated themselves at the table closest to the kitchen, and asked for scrambled eggs. Ciocci assigned a man to serve them.
At 0603 two jeeps from wing pulled up at the kitchen door, and the lieutenant and two sergeants from the flight line came in for the flight lunches. On this morning there was another lieutenant, dark and stringy, with them. Forty-eight flight lunches would make quite a load, and in Smith’s mind this accounted for the extra jeep and extra lieutenant.
As always, the lieutenant counted the flight lunches and paid for them with the chits collected from the offices of the aircrews. Then he said, “I’m not sure I counted right. You sure there are forty-eight?”
Ciocci began to count the boxes again, and Smith, at his side, checked the count. Neither noticed Colonel Lundstrom and Major Glick peering through the glass in the door to the mess hall.
“I make it forty-eight, right,” said Ciocci.
“Forty-eight,” said Smith.
The lieutenant looked at his list. “Now about coffee,” he said. “Three coffees.” Ciocci noted the the lieutenant’s hands were trembling, as if with morning jitters after a big night.
Smith reached up and selected three bottles from the thermos shelf. He picked the three closest to the wall. “Here you are, sir,” he said. “Good and hot.”
At this point there was a slight variation in the detail’s usual behavior. The second lieutenant, the strange one, stepped forward and accepted the thermos bottles. Two of them he handed to the security officer from wing. The third one he held close to his ear and shook gently, as if to judge its fullness. Then he nodded, as if confirming an unspoken remark, and looked over their heads towards the door. Ciocci turned his head in time to see the colonel from Washington, and Major Glick, charge through the door towards him.
Not until the strange lieutenant waggled the thermos close to his ear did Smith have any intimation of anything unusual, and even this gesture did not cause comprehensive alarm. But when the lieutenant nodded to someone behind Smith’s back, he sensed a dangerous situation, although his mind could not instantly adjust itself to knowledge that he was trapped. Just before he landed from the submarine, in June of the previous year, the high-ranking MVD official had called him and the three others into the captain’s cabin. He had presented each of them with metal-cased capsules, long as the tip of his little finger. “In case you are taken, and interrogation and torture is probable,” the MVD man had told them, “this is an easy and quick and painless way out of it.”
Now he was in deep trouble, but long ago Smith had flushed the capsule down a toilet. To keep it, he had felt, would be an inner admission of the possibility of failure. Besides, if it came to the touch, he had a better and quicker way of dying—and carrying his enemies with him. There were two fuses in the thermos. One could be activated only by air pressure, but the second activated instantly if the top was unscrewed. The second fuse was an obvious precaution. Without it, an airman might unscrew the top before necessary altitude was reached, and find the bottle contained no coffee. With the second fuse, the thermos was not only a bomb, but an ingenious booby trap. Smith reached out his hand and said, casually, “Say, maybe I gave you the wrong bottle. Let’s see it, Lieutenant.”
The lieutenant made no move.
Fingers hard and painful as metal tongs clamped on Smith’s arm and he was spun around to face a wide-shouldered colonel, the one who never slept, with a wild look in his eyes. Smith recognized the look of killing, having seen it several times before. Smith was fascinated by this look, and he never saw the blow coming. His next conscious realization was that he was under the wooden worktable, the left side of his face was numb, and that he was scrambling and clawing to get up. A slap on the ear knocked him to his hands and knees again and set his head to ringing dizzily. He looked around at a fence of braced legs and poised feet. Slowly, certain that a shoe would crash into his face, bracing himself for the blow, he crawled out from under the table.
He heard the colonel say, “All right, stand up, you son of a bitch.”
Smith stood up, shielding his face with his arms, expecting to be hit again. Nobody touched him. Incongruously, his thoughts returned again to the submarine, and the last thing Karl Schiller, the German navigator, had told him. He had asked Schiller about the eight Germans who during the Fatherland War were landed on the same beach, and Schiller had replied, cheerful, gruesome, and truthful, “They were all caught and executed.” It had been a lousy thing to say.
He saw that they were not going to hit him, and he lowered his arms. They simply stood in a circle, quiet and deadly as a noose, and stared at him as if he were not human. He wanted to tell them he was no disgusting traitor. He was an officer of the Red Army, performing his assigned duties. He decided to keep still, at least for the time being. He would not open his mouth. The activities and lives of three others depended upon his silence. Being soft and knowing nothing of total war, the Americans would not torture him. And he might yet escape. Monday was coming. Something big was bound to happen.
The colonel nodded to the tall lieutenant. “Well take this man to the guardroom in administration. He doesn’t believe it, but he’s going to sing like a bird.”
Smith knew what this meant, in American slang. He was determined not to sing, not a note.
7
Buddy Conklin was in his own office, and Jesse was with him, when Lundstrom called from the mess hall. “General,” Lundstrom said, “we nailed him. In the act. With three more gadgets. Know wh
at I’m talking about? Price has filled you in, hasn’t he?”
“Sure. Congratulations.”
“He’ll fry. He’ll fry but he won’t talk. Not yet, anyway. Won’t even answer to his name. I’m bringing him over to the guardroom. I’m going to work on him. Any news from the other bases?”
“Nothing yet. But there’ll be hell in the kitchens,” Conklin said. “Bring that bastard over. When I have time, I want to take a good look at him.”
Conklin put down the phone and Jesse said, “I guess that’s the whistle for the kickoff, isn’t it?”
“That’s it. I’m going to call Operations and order the first wave to start bombing up. They ought to be off by oh-eight-hundred. What about the Five-Nineteenth Wing?”
“They’ll be ready by ten,” Jesse said. “They’ve already started pre-flight briefing.”
For the first time in many days Conklin smiled. Uncertainty and fear had been routed. Now everyone knew what to do. “The first wave will go with target maps but without orders,” he said. “They keep on heading north until they reach Gander. If they don’t get orders sooner they’ll get them there, I hope. Anyway, a dispatch came in from Limestone saying they have authority to give us in-flight refuelling, anywhere along the route. I’m going to ask Limestone to have their tankers rendezvous with our Nine-Nines at Gander, so if any of our planes malfunction in fuelling they’ll have a place to light. If nothing has happened by the time they get to Gander I’ll send them on to Thule, and they can top off from tankers there. Whatever happens we’ll have a striking force, loaded, in the air, and in the north. That’s as good a break as anybody could ask, starting cold like this.”
Conklin called a sergeant and dictated a message to SAC. The saboteur at Hibiscus, Airman 2/c Stanley Smith, had been caught with three pressure bombs in his possession. By 1000, one whole wing plus twelve planes, armed with thermonuclear weapons and briefed for targets long ago assigned, would be in the air.
Now SAC’s commander was on the job. Almost at once his reply dropped on Conklin’s desk. “YOUR ACTION AFFIRMED. CONGRATULATIONS.”
At 0757 Jess was watching from Buddy Conklin’s double picture windows as the first of the twelve B-99’s, originally scheduled for the milk run to California, took off. The muted thunder of their engines, and the grace of their lifting wings, set his heart to pounding. War could be exciting, and even beautiful, if you could black out the end result. This would be no milk run. If they were sent on all the way—and Jesse was quite certain they would go all the way—they would encounter fighters, flak batteries, a whole family of inhuman guided missiles to be repulsed only by inhuman means, and perhaps weapons of which they had heard nothing and against which they could present no defense. But there was also a chance that they would all get through. If these twelve all got through, they alone would likely be enough. They would turn a sizable fraction of earth into a segment of hell. There was no past war in history that they alone could not have decided in an hour.
Jesse was still at work an hour later, and the B-99’s of the 519th Wing were being towed to the runways, one by one, when another message came in from SAC. An airman named Johnson had been caught with pressure bombs in his possession at Lake Charles, had crushed a metal vial filled with cyanide between his teeth, and had died before he could be questioned. At Corpus Christi another, Masters, had been taken. Masters had tried to kill himself in the same manner, but his guards had prevented it. Why Masters’ guards were alert was not explained. Masters was now engaged in making a confession. He had already implicated a fourth man, whose name he gave as Gregg Palmer. All bases were urged to be on the lookout for Palmer, to comb their rosters and their kitchens. All four men, according to Masters’ confession, were officers of the Red Army or Air Force.
As Jesse read this message, his eye felt jumpy. He could not focus it properly on the yellow teletype paper. His eye wouldn’t steady, and neither would his mind. He could not force himself to concentrate. When you possessed one eye only, it could get badly overworked. It was likely to rebel, and since it was the only eye you had, it was necessary to coddle it. He laid his head in the crook of his arm to relax for a moment. Four men, he thought. Four men fitted that warning from the FBI.
It could have been a minute later, or an hour, that he realized someone was shaking his shoulder. Conklin’s voice said, “Come on, Jess, wake up.”
Price lifted his head and opened his bloodshot eye.
“What about that private plane sitting out on the field?” Conklin asked. “Security wants to know when the passengers can get out. Security says they’re fuming. Any reason to keep ’em out there, Jess?”
“No. No reason at all,” Jesse said. He shook his head to make his brain come to life, as you shake a stopped watch. “I’m sorry. Forgot all about them.”
“I guess you’ve had it for a while,” Conklin said. “I’ll take care of them. You get some rest because I’m going to need you later. My driver will take you to the BOQ.”
“Okay,” Jesse said. “A little nap and a shower and I’ll be fresh.” He walked down to the first floor of administration and noticed a knot of airmen in front of the Air Police guardroom. The prisoner would be in there. He had to take a look at the man. He wasn’t too tired for that.
Jesse pushed his way through the group of curious airmen, a guard came to attention and saluted, and he walked inside. The man was under the floodlight in the interrogation room, seated. He was being questioned by Lundstrom and Fischer. Jesse recognized the blond, handsome, gray-eyed airman who several times had served him since he had been on the base. This was Smith. Except for a purpling eye, the man was unmarked.
Excessive fatigue can act as a drug. It can relieve a man of his senses. Perhaps it was the fatigue, or perhaps he thought again of Dinky, his friend whom this man had murdered. Jesse interrupted the interrogation by attempting to strangle Smith. Later, he could remember the whole episode only vaguely. He could not remember saying anything, or doing anything except that he walked into the circle of light and grasped Smith’s throat in his hands.
Lundstrom and Fischer pulled him off, with difficulty. They held Jesse against the whitewashed wall until they felt him relax, and he said, “Okay, okay. Lost my head.”
“I’d like to feed him to you, Jess,” Lundstrom said, releasing his arms, “but right now he’s mine.”
“Talk yet?” Jesse asked.
“Won’t even tell us his name.” Lundstrom turned on the prisoner. “Will you, Mr. Smith?”
Smith looked up, woodenly, one hand over his throat. His windpipe was bruised, and he was gasping. Momentarily, he had felt fear. It would be a shame to die now, Smith thought, almost on the eve of the attack certain to come. If he could only hold them off until Monday, everything might change. It would be smart, now, to feign serious injury. That crazy one-eyed major had done him a favor. Still holding to his throat, Smith pitched face down on the floor.
Lieutenant Fischer bent down and rolled him over on his back. “Hadn’t I better get a medic, sir?” Fischer asked.
“Yes,” said Colonel Lundstrom. “Right away.” He looked down at Smith’s face and smiled. He reached over, picked Smith up by the armpits, and lifted him back into the chair. “You’re going to get medical attention, all right, Mr. Smith, but it won’t be exactly what you expect.”
Smith closed his eyes and groaned and swayed. He didn’t like the sound of the colonel’s voice.
“You fellows don’t think that you invented confessions, do you?” the colonel went on. “I understand that sometimes, in Russia, it takes a week to ten days to get a confession out of a man. But we’re going to have a confession out of you about forty-five minutes after the doctor gets here. Oh, we could follow the Russian method. We could strip you naked and slap you around and prevent you from sleeping, but we haven’t got time for that. Ever hear of sodium pentathol, Mr. Smith?”
Somewhere, Smith knew, he had heard of sodium pentathol, but he didn’t exactly remember what
it was. He would have to put on a good act, when the doctor arrived. He coughed, and tried to fall from the chair again, but the colonel’s hand forced him back.
“Sodium pentathol is also called truth serum, Mr. Smith,” Lundstrom said. “It’ll make you feel wonderful. You’ll soar like a bird, and you’ll sing like one.”
Smith opened his eyes and looked up, to search the colonel’s face and see whether he was serious. This was wholly unfair, something worse than torture. The thought of being unable to control his tongue appalled him. So long as he could control his tongue he had a chance of living until Monday. He could stretch out an interrogation. He could lead this inhuman colonel into a hundred rhetorical cul-de-sacs. But he knew what would happen under an injection of truth serum. He would tell everything, quickly. Once he had told everything, somebody might decide to kill him, quickly. Smith spoke for the first time. “It is contrary to the laws of war to do anything like that. I am an officer of the Red Army.”
They were silent.
“I demand to be treated as an officer!”
“Well, no,” Lundstrom said. “You’re either a traitor, or a spy, maybe both. You’re in the wrong uniform, buster, to be treated as a Red officer.”
A young flight surgeon came into the interrogation room. “I hear you’ve got a saboteur, and he had an accident,” he said, smiling.
“Yes,” Lundstrom said, “his neck got caught in Major Price’s hands. He needs about seven and a half grains of sodium pentathol, and damn’ fast. He wants to talk, but we haven’t got time for lies or political lectures. Stick him, Doctor!”