by John Barnes
Freed of so much mass, the gasbag and keel structure had leaped up into the air, in flames, rolling over, and blown completely with a great roar, the burning wreckage falling back into the dockyards. “Did ’em more good than twenty bombers could have,” he said.
All this time, as we talked, we were whirring up the coastline of the Malay Peninsula; there was a fuel depot at Songhkla, and if we could gas up there, we could make Saigon in the early evening. We had no way of knowing whether or not Singapore would be taken—I still thought it was a raid, von Braun still suspected it was the lead force for an invasion—but at least, for the moment, von Braun and LeMay wouldn’t be captured.
I was not feeling particularly good about my performance as chief of security, though both of them pointed out that what I was supposed to do was defend against the occasional infiltrator or assassin, not against a fully armed military assault.
There was really nothing for von Braun or me to do except watch LeMay fly, and though autogyros are interesting gadgets technically, riding in them is not necessarily any more amusing than riding in any other aircraft. We sat down, and I pulled out the SHAKK to have a look at it.
That meant telling von Braun and LeMay my story—which didn’t seem like a big deal since their clearance was higher than mine—and showing von Braun the chip in my neck. He nodded for a moment, then he said, “I have a thought, if you’d like.”
I said sure; he took the SHAKK carefully, opened the reloading drawer, pulled out some change from his pocket, dropped it into the drawer, and closed it. The message changed instantly.
“What’s it say now?” he asked me.
I looked at the display, which was now scrolling a long message horizontally, and read “‘MORE RELOAD NEEDED. COPPER 35%, ZINC 12%, IRON 0%, SILVER 87%, CARBON 0%, SILICON 0%, RARE EARTHS 0%.’ Well, you made it do something, but I don’t know what.”
“Read the numbers to me again,” he said, taking out a pad and writing them down carefully. He reopened the drawer, and his change was gone. Then he rummaged in his pockets for change and started counting around in it, finally finding four copper pennies. “These are all prewar, should be all copper, right?” He set them in the SHAKK’S drawer and slid the drawer home again. “Now read.”
I did again. “‘MORE RELOAD NEEDED. COPPER 42%, ZINC 12%, IRON 0%, SILVER 87%, CARBON 0%, SILICON 0%, RARE EARTHS 0%.’ I don’t see—oh, wait, it’s like the Minimum Daily Requirement on a cereal box! I mean—well, never mind. It’s telling us how much it has of each thing it needs!”
Some random screws from the tool kit brought iron up above zero; slivers of a broken drinking glass (we found it under a seat, apparently some VIP had had it along) got us the silicon. The carbon and some of the rare earths came from my handkerchief and the back cardboard of von Braun’s notebook. LeMay cheerfully informed us we were crazy and pointed out that modern explosive powders tended to contain some rare metals; I slid in a whole clip for the .45, and it digested that, and one odd-looking pair of pliers from the tool kit, and then …
I looked at the message. “MORE RELOAD POSSIBLE. ROUNDS: 23.”
“Gun port to your left,” LeMay said. “Let’s try it out.”
The gun port was really made for a man with a rifle or submachine gun, but I shoved the SHAKK up against it, set it for a hex burst, and watched as LeMay brought us down to treetop level over a deserted beach. We flew low and slow as I picked out a particular palm tree, squeezed the trigger—and heard the wonderful sound of a SHAKK burst going out. The palm tree burst into splinters halfway up and fell over.
“How did you know that would work?” I asked von Braun. “Obviously when I get back on the ground all I have to do is shovel a bunch of junk into it, and it makes its own ammo.”
Von Braun nodded. “Well, I didn’t know that it would work at all, but I thought about the guy who must have designed it, and the people you said would carry it. They clearly could not all go back to reload every time, so they must be carrying spare ammunition—but that wasn’t true. So it seemed to me that powder had to be something commonly available, but if as you say ATN operates in places where there is no technological civilization, it couldn’t be anything you had to make—and yet from your description it wasn’t a natural material either. So if it wasn’t the finished product and it wasn’t the natural source—it must be a raw material. And then it occurred to me that a gun you can reload by putting rocks and metal scrap into it would be a very useful thing indeed for one of these Special Agents or Time Scouts you were describing. At that point I had an idea to try, so I tried it.”
It made sense to me when it was explained; I wondered why I hadn’t thought of it. I consoled myself with the fact that I was not, after all—and here I almost laughed out loud—a rocket scientist, and, besides, art historians use a lot of scientific gadgets but we don’t exactly do experiments—no matter what you feed a rat he won’t start drawing in perspective.
The fuel dump at Songhkla was able to take care of us quickly; we were flying out over the water as the sun went down behind us, and before midnight the sparkling city of Saigon glowed beneath us. We had reached the command by radio, and they were expecting us.
That night was spent answering questions for the intelligence guys, over and over and over, while they took more and more notes. It was irritating, but I saw the point when I learned that the forces landing on Singapore had hit every active weapons project, bypassing all the fake “Engineering” sections that had skeleton crews and empty buildings.
“I don’t honestly think they cared about anything other than getting your group,” said the tall, thin, balding man with the Russian accent. “I think they didn’t mind hitting some of the others, but that was a cover. By far the largest force hit Engineering Fifteen, at exactly the time when they could kill the most personnel and destroy the most material. They wanted us shut down in that area. I think there is no question.”
Von Braun groaned in frustration. “Don’t you see it? Don’t you see it?”
The man leaned forward. “Tell me.”
“They have space launch themselves already. That means they can look down on everything we do, and they can target accurately and at will. There are half a dozen sites I can name, and I’m sure a hundred that I don’t know about, that are potentially their targets. They hit the facility at Singapore because they already knew it was there—and they know where everything else is. In a dozen raids or so they can destroy whatever hope we have of besting them; after that they can slowly pound apart our means of making modern war. We may linger on in the jungles for another ten years, but our real threat to them is over.”
“Not quite over,” the tall man said. “We will see what we can do.”
We had been up all night, and we were pretty frustrated; I didn’t know what we could do about anything right now, and when I went to bed, to sleep through most of the next day, I had bad dreams and thrashed around a lot.
The next couple of days were dull in another way; when the intelligence guys weren’t asking me just one more time to see if maybe I remembered something this time that I never had before, I was being processed in the great paperwork swamp that had built up in Saigon. A security chief whose facility has been destroyed doesn’t have a job, and since I didn’t have the position, the one thing I really wanted to know—whether Singh and Prasad and the rest of them had come through, how many killed and wounded we’d taken—was now classified information that they could not tell me.
That meant floating from desk to desk a lot, and quite possibly getting myself written up as an obsessive nut who was a security risk since he seemed to want to know classified information. I wasn’t doing my prospects for another posting any good, but I had to know.
Three days later, as I was walking along one of the broad boulevards, trying to enjoy the sunshine and the feeling of safety that Saigon gave me in those days, and not succeeding because I had just been trapped between two petty clerks who each thought I should have talked to t
he other one first, I heard a voice behind me say, “Hey, kid, you still a straight shot with a .45?”
It was Patton, big as life (which was pretty big) and striding out of the crowd to say hello. Before I knew it I was off to eat with him and his staff; he knew all about the disaster in Singapore, and, being the kind of generous and effective leader he was, suspected that I might be blaming myself.
As a result, I got to tell him about my frustrations, and in only the time it took him to bellow into a dozen phones, I had the answers I wanted—Singh and Prasad were all right, we had lost seven guards to death and two were missing, and there were about a dozen wounded, none on the critical list anymore.
It wasn’t great news, but it was news.
After that he wanted to talk about my next posting; I had not been thinking that far ahead, since my present occupation seemed to consist of talking to intelligence types. He made a couple more calls, then said, “You know, Strang, you might have told me that a little force of auxiliary security guards you trained held off an SS paratroop force three times their size. It’s hard to help a man who won’t blow his own horn! I’m just going to have a little chat with old Giap—I have a feeling he’s apt to have a use for you. And no more hiding your light under a bushel!”
I had just about enough time to thank him for straightening the mess out for me, and for lunch, before he and his three junior officers were piling into his jeep to race away. “Mims,” he said—I was not to hear his voice again for a while—“I do believe we are late at the airport, and I think in all likelihood that Monty will be angry and will stamp his little footie and pout about it. Shall we thank the gentleman for helping us be late?”
Sergeant Mims, the driver who had been with Patton through all of the years, right from the start of the AEF, turned around and grinned at me. “Sir, you couldn’t have known, but taking care of your problems has made the general late. This is going to make Field Marshal Montgomery very angry. So thank you for making General Patton’s day!”
They roared away; the captain and lieutenant riding in the back waved a little sheepishly. I suppose they were used to this sort of thing but could never be sure who else might or might not be.
Two days later I received orders and space-a pass to take me up to Hanoi for a meeting with General Giap the next week. I wrote a thank-you note to Patton—and I never write thank-you notes, Mom always had a terrible time with me about that—packed my single suitcase, squared my bill at the pension I was staying in, and caught the next bus to the airport.
When I arrived at General Giap’s office, he was just finishing up some sort of staff briefing, so I had to cool my heels outside a bit. There were a number of delicate little watercolors on the wall, quite good in the Annamese and Hmong traditions, and I studied them carefully, letting the analytic process shut off more worrisome matters for the time being.
“I sometimes wonder—does our art say anything to an outsider?” Giap asked, behind me.
“It might not say what you intend it to, but it does say something,” I said. “It’s a way of seeing the world, and it’s interesting to see other people’s ways of seeing.”
He nodded, as if I had said something profound, and showed me into his office. “What I am about to tell you,” he said, “is a matter of highest confidence. To be honest about it, we are giving you this post not so much because we think you can do it—we think perhaps no one can do it—but because you did rather well in a hopeless situation. General Patton was impressed with how you had trained your men; I was impressed with the fact that you actually managed a counter-attack, even if an unsuccessful one.
“What we have for you to do is to guard our last possible key to victory. We will have to depend on you to be resourceful; your job, if you are willing to take it, is to think of every possible way some enemy might try to knock out the facility, and to make sure that way is blocked. Technically you will be a staff officer under General Minh, but he intends to give you a fair amount of autonomy and ability to command resources.
“What you will be guarding is the facility designed to give the Axis its death blow. The code name for the place is Engineering Forty-six. You will see one familiar face there—Dr. von Braun has accepted a position.
“As you know, we’ve made considerable use of nuclear energy here since the Free Zone was established. In fact we’ve even tested a couple of atomic bombs in underground caverns, using their neutron production to make more plutonium.
“The information you brought has allowed Dr. Teller to make a more powerful kind of bomb, the ‘fusion’ or ‘hydrogen’ bomb. How it works, I have no idea. But they say it will. And we have enough rocket motors left so that Dr. von Braun has been able to assure us he can build enough missiles to deliver two dozen of these superbombs to anywhere in the world we select.
“When those missiles fly, our forces will attempt to break out of this hellish pocket in which we have been cornered for a decade. We know we can count on uprisings around the world, and what we hope to do is to catch the Nazis with their leadership cut off, local forces paralyzed by indecision, and supply lines in complete disarray. They were never really able to occupy all the vast territory they control, especially since they decided to allocate very little of it to their French, Spanish, Italian, and Japanese allies; this is why they had to leave your country in charge of its home-grown Nazis after so brief a Reconstruction. In many, many places the underground is ready to break out and take over, so long as the local fascists cannot get support from the Luftwaffe and from the world headquarters. And once these missiles hit, they will not be able to.
“We have only a very limited amount of time. The rockets are being set up and the bombs hauled out to them as quickly as we can go. The raid on Singapore has shown us that the Nazis know we are up to something which could bring them down; and with these artificial moons of theirs, despite our best efforts, they will undoubtedly know all about what we are up to within a short while. We are getting as much air cover as possible for the area where you will be working, but we have to be alert for a possible ground attack, and, of course, we are critically short of radar capabilities—so although we can spot a high-level bombing run, airborne commandos might well get through.
“Your mission, Mr. Strang, is to make sure that nothing whatsoever happens to the missile field.”
“Glad to be of service,” I said.
“Understand, no one can tell you where or how the threat will come.”
“That’s usual in my line of work.”
“I knew you would say that.” He stood up; I was always startled when he did that, for he was a small, physically slight man, but his dignity and intelligence, and his fierce approach to everything, tended to make you forget that until you were standing right next to him. He smiled slightly. “And I do hope that you and I will meet again when the world is at peace. I had always hoped to be a professor of history, you know—circumstances dictated otherwise. I should like to hear what you think of my paintings sometime, over sherry in a faculty club somewhere, where the most serious violence is on the soccer field.”
I shook his hand, bowed, and agreed. It had taken a very short time, and I was eager to get on with the mission. “Can you tell me, or should I wait to find out, just where this missile field is going to be?”
“I think we can safely tell you. It’s in a little place you’ve never heard of, a provincial town north and west of here, called then Bien Phu.”
General Minh was a big, easy guy with a big, hard job. He was happy to turn me loose on it. The next week, the only break I took was a brief dinner one night with von Braun. He wanted to know what had happened to the security forces at Singapore, just as I had, and I got from him the accounting of whom we had lost at mission control—I couldn’t quite imagine that the whole Philly Navy Yard crew was gone, but they were.
I spent much of the time just walking the ground. The village of then Bien Phu itself had had about a thousand people before the war, but it had s
wollen to six times that size with crews and technicians. They were hiding as much as they could from the air (and though few of them knew it, from space), but there was no concealing the fact that Provincial Highway 41, which had been a good-weather gravel track, was now a four-lane highway. Nor, really, could the launchpads sprouting like mushrooms up in the hills be entirely concealed, though the control bunkers were at least hidden under what looked like houses from the air.
Everyone knew we would be better off putting the missiles into silos, because freestanding as they were they could be blown over by a bomb a hundred yards away from them, and if they tipped over, the damage would put an end to their usefulness. But everyone knew we didn’t have the time, the resources, even the concrete, to put them in silos. So we just kept our fingers crossed; it was all we could do.
Or almost all. The other thing I did was walk around with a French major, a guy named Bigeard, who had managed to make it to Britain and traveled all the way here with Patton. Or possibly with God. I wasn’t sure Bigeard could tell the difference.
He’d been a paratrooper, made the landings behind the German lines that had slowed them down at York to allow the AEF to escape, jumped again at Cumberland, Maryland, and Petersburg, Virginia, in the spearheads of other failed counterattacks. He’d made about ten more jumps in various raids.
“No question,” he told me. “There are only four decent places to jump into here. The SS might be crazy enough, you know, to jump somewhere else, but they will be no better off for it if they do. The airfield, the land across the ditch from the airfield, or along the Nam Yum below the town, up on the flatland above the river on either the west or east side. That’s all. If they cannot land there, they cannot land at all.”
There were a lot of kids in the village, and nobody had time to run a school, so I put the kids to stringing barbed wire around in the bushes in the drop zones, to digging pits and setting pungee sticks, and, where possible, to digging deeper holes that could be expected to flood. I did nothing to hide this from the satellites; I wanted them to think about it a lot.