borrowed a cigarette and lit it. “I think the chances are about sixty-forty,” he said, “that they’ve started their countdown.”
Ace’s fingers stroked the red phone. “Well,” he said, “we’re as ready as we ever will be. Fourteen percent of the force is airborne now and another seventeen percent on standby. I’m pre pared to hold that ratio until we’re relieved at 0800. How’s that sound to you, Mark?”
As always, the responsibility to act lay with A-3. Mark Bragg, as A-2, could only advise. He said, “That’s a pretty big effort. You can’t keep the whole force in the air and on standby all the time. I know that, and yet “ He stretched. “I’ll trot back to my cave and see what else comes in. I’ll check with you in an hour.”
On his desk, Mark found copies of three more urgent dispatches. One, from the Air attach, in Ankara, reported Russian aerial reconnaissance over the Azerbaijan frontier. Another, from the Navy Department, gave a submarine-sighting two hundred miles off Seattle, definitely a skunk. The third, received by the State Department from London in the highest secret classification, said Downing Street had authorized the RAF to arm intermediate range missiles, including the Thor, with nuclear warheads.
In an hour Helen’s plane would touch down in Orlando. In two hours, if the plane was on time, Helen and the children would be in an area of comparative safety. Mark prayed that for the next two hours, at least, nothing more would happen. He held fast to the thought, so long as there was no war, there was always a chance for peace. As the minutes and hours eroded away, and no word came from Moscow, he became more and more certain that a massive strike had been ordered. He diagnosed this negative intelligence as more ominous than almost anything that could have happened, and determined to awaken General Hawker if it persisted.
At three-thirty in the morning Randolph Bragg waited in Orlando’s air terminal for Helen’s flight. With only a few night coaches scheduled in from New York, plus the non-stop from Chicago, the building was almost empty except for sweepers and scrubwomen. When he saw a plane’s landing lights, Randy walked outside to the gate. On the other side of the field, near the military hangars used by Air-Sea Rescue Command, he saw the silhouettes of six B-47s, part of the wing from McCoy, he deduced, using this field in accordance with a dispersal plan. The military hangars and Operations building were bright with light, which at this hour was not usual.
The big transport came in for its landing, approached on the taxi strip, pivoted to a halt before him, and cut its engines. He saw that only a few people were getting off Most would be going on to Miami. He saw Peyton and Ben Franklin come down the steps, Ben incongruously wearing an overcoat, Peyton carrying a bow, a quiver of arrows over her shoulder. Then he saw Helen and she waved and he ran out to meet them.
Randy rumpled Ben Franklin’s hair. The children were both owl-eyed and tired. He leaned over, kissed Peyton, and relieved her of the bow slung over her shoulder. Helen said, “She’s been watching Robin Hood. She thinks she’s Maid Marian.”
Helen was wearing a long cashmere coat and carrying a fur cape over her arm. She appeared fresh, as if starting rather than completing a journey. She was slight-Mark sometimes referred to her as “my pocket Venus-” yet Randy was never aware of that except when he saw her completely relaxed. At all other times her body seemed to obey the physical law that kinetic energy increases mass. Her abundant vitality she somehow communicated to others, so that when Helen was present everyone’s blood flowed a little faster, as Randy’s did now. She tiptoed to kiss him and said, “I feel like ten kinds of a fool, Randy.”
He said, “Don’t be silly.”
They walked toward the terminal. She presented him with a sheaf of baggage checks. “Mark made me take everything. We’re going to be an awful nuisance. Also, I feel like a coward.”
“You won’t when you hear what’s just happened in the Med.”
Ben Franklin turned, suddenly awake, and said, “What happened in the Med, Randy?”
Randy looked at Helen, inquiringly. She said, “It’s all right. Both of them know all about it. I didn’t realize it until we were on the plane. Children are precocious these days, aren’t they? They learn the facts of life before you have a chance to explain anything.”
While they waited for the luggage, Randy spoke of the news.
They listened gravely. Ben Franklin alone commented. “Sounds like the kickoff. I guess Dad knew what he was doing.” Nothing more was said about it for a time.
Randy felt relieved when the suburbs of Orlando were behind them and, with traffic thin at this hour, he was holding to a steady seventy. He thought his apprehension illogical. Why should he be upset by the remark of a thirteen-year-old boy? When he was sure the children slept in the back seat, he said, “They take it calmly, almost as a matter of course, don’t they?”
“Yes,” Helen said. “You see, all their lives, ever since they’ve known anything, they’ve lived under the shadow of war-atomic war. For them the abnormal has become normal. All their lives they have heard nothing else, and they expect it.”
`They’re conditioned,” Randy said. “A child of the nineteenth century would quickly go mad with fear, I think, in the world of today. It must have been pretty wonderful to have lived in the years, say, between 1870 and 1914, when peace was the normal condition and people really were appalled at the idea of war, and believed there’d never be a big one. A big one was impossible, they used to say. It would cost too much. It would disrupt world trade and bankrupt everybody. Even after the First World War people didn’t accept war as normal. They had to call it The War to End War or we wouldn’t have fought it. Helen, what has become of us?”
Helen, busy tuning the car radio, trying to bring in fresh news, said, “You’re a bit of an idealist, aren’t you, Randy?”
“I suppose so. It’s been an expensive luxury. Maybe one day I’ll get conditioned. I’ll accept things, like the children.”
Helen said, “Listen!” She had brought in a Miami station, and the announcer was saying the station was remaining on the air through the night to give news of the new crisis.
“Now we have a bulletin from Washington,” he said: “The Navy Department has finally released a full statement on the Latakia incident. Early today a Navy carrier-based fighter fired a single air-to-air rocket at an unidentified jet plane which had been shadowing units of the Sixth Fleet. This rocket exploded in the harbor area of Latakia. The Navy calls it a regrettable mechanical error. It is possible that this rocket struck an ammunition train and started a chain explosion, the statement admits. The Navy categorically denies any deliberate bombardment. We will bring you further bulletins as they are received.”
The Miami station began to broadcast a medley of second World War patriotic songs which Randy remembered from boyhood. One was “Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition.” It sounded tinny and in poor taste, but Miami’s entertainment was usually in poor taste.
Randy said, “Do you believe it? Is it possible?”
Helen didn’t answer. She was staring straight ahead, as if hypnotized by the headlights’ beam, and her lips were moving. He realized that her mind was far away. She had not heard him.
Randy had them all in their rooms, and asleep, by five-thirty. He had carried all their luggage, eleven bags, upstairs.
He went to his own apartment and collapsed on the studio couch in the living room. Graf jumped up and snuggled under his arm. Almost at once, without bothering to loosen his belt or remove his shoes, Randy slept.
It was 0500 at Offutt Field, with dawn still more than two hours distant, when General Hawker, unbidden, returned to the Hole. The General followed in the tradition of Vandenberg, Norstad, and LeMay. He had received his fourth star while still in his forties, and now, at fifty, considered it part of his job that he remain slim and in excellent physical condition. Once warfare, except among the untutored savages, had been fought during the daylight hours. This had changed during the twentieth century until now rockets and aircraft recognized neither darkness nor bad weather, and were handicapped neither by oceans nor mountains nor distance. Now, the critical factor in warfare was time, measured in minutes or seconds. Hawker had adjusted his life to this condition. In the past week he had not slept more than four hours at a stretch. He had trained himself to catnap in his office for tenor twenty-minute periods, after which he felt remarkably refreshed.
The engineers who designed the Hole had arranged that the Commander in Chief’s Command Post be on a glass-enclosed balcony, from which he could see all the War Room maps, and all the activity on the floor below, and be surrounded by his staff In this moment it wasn’t operating like that at all. Hawker had his feet up on the desk in the Control Room. He was drinking black coffee from a green dimestore mug, and rapidly reading through a stack of the more important operational and intelligence dispatches. Occasionally, the General fired a question at
