he told Hart, “you better get with General Heycock. He’s hungry and when he gets hungry he gets fierce. How about helping his aide dig up some transport and get him over to the O Club? We’re only here to gas up. Takeoff is in fifty minutes.”
Hart looked up and saw three blue Air Force sedans swing up the driveway. “There’s the General’s transport right there,” he said, and then, realizing that Mark had tactfully implied he wanted to be alone with his brother, added, “But I’ll go along to the O Club, and get the mess officer on the ball.” He shook hands and said, “See you, Mark, next time around.”
“Sure,” Mark said. He turned to Randy. “Where’s your car? I’ve got a lot to say and not much time to say it. We can talk in the car. But first let’s get some candy, or something, inside Ops. We didn’t load any flight lunches at Ramey.”
The front seat of the Bonneville was like a sunny comfortable private office. Randy asked the essential question first: “What time do Helen and the children get in?”
Mark brought a notebook out of his hip pocket. “Three thirty tomorrow morning, local time, at Orlando Municipal. Carmody—he’s Wing Commander at Ramey—has a friend in the Eastern office in San Juan. He ramrodded it through for me. The plane leaves Omaha at seven-ten tonight. One change, in Chicago.”
“Isn’t that a little rough on Helen and the kids?”
“They can sleep all the way from Chicago to Orlando. It’ll be just as tough on you, meeting them. The important thing is I got the reservation. This time of year, it took some doing.”
“What’s the great rush?” Randy demanded. “What the hell’s going on?”
“Contain yourself, son,” Mark said. “I’m going to give you a complete briefing.”
“Have you told Helen yet?”
“I sent her a cable from San Juan. Just told her I’d made reservations for tonight. She’ll understand.” He squinted at the gaudy dials and gleaming knobs on the dash. “Some buggy you’ve got here, Randy. Won’t be worth a damn to you. About Helen, she and I thrashed all this out long ago, but she won’t like it. Not at all will she like it, now that the time has come. But I’ll have her on that plane if I have to truss her up and send her air freight.”
Randy said nothing. He simply tapped the car clock, a reminder.
“Okay,” Mark said, “I’ll brief you. First strategic, then tactical.” He pushed a peanut-butter cracker into his mouth, found his pen, and began to sketch in his notebook. He drew a rough map, the Mediterranean.
Mark doesn’t cerebrate until he has a pen in his hand, Randy thought, and can see a map. Probably makes him feel comfortable, like he’s holding a pointer in the SAC War Room.
“The key is the Med,” Mark said. “For three hundred years the Russians have tried to pry open the Straits and debouch into the Mediterranean. Peter the Great, Catherine the Great, Czar
Alexander, they all tried it. Now, more than ever, control of the Med means control of the world.”
Randy nodded. Conquerors knew or sensed this. Caesar had done it, Xerxes, Napoleon, and Hitler failed. “If Xerxes had won at Salamis,” he said, “we’d all be speaking Persian-but that was a long time pre-Sputnik, and pre-ICBM. I thought the fight, now, was for control of space. Who controls space controls the world.” Mark smiled. “It can also happen just the other way around. We-by we I mean the NATO coalition-aren’t going to be allowed time to catch up with them in operational IC’s, much less control space. Now don’t argue with me. We have their War Plan.”
Randy took a deep breath and sat up straight.
“For the first time Russia has bridgeheads in the Mediterranean-here, here, and here-” Mark drew ovals on the map. “They have a fleet in the Med as powerful as ours when you match their submarine strength against our carriers. They have Turkey ringed on three sides, and if they could upset the Turkish government, and force capitulation of the Bosporus and Dardanelles, they would have won the war without fighting. The Med would be theirs, Africa cut off from Europe, NATO outflanked on the south, and one by one all our allies-except England- would fall into their laps or declare themselves neutral. SAC’s bases in Africa and Spain would be untenable and melt away. NATO would fold up, and the IR sites we’re planning never be finished.”
“That was their gambit in ‘fifty-seven, wasn’t it?” Randy asked.
“You have a good memory, Randy, and that’s a good simile. The Russians are great chess players. They rarely make the same mistake twice. Now, today, they’re making moves. It’s the same gambit-but with a tremendous difference. In ‘fifty-seven, when it looked like they were going to make another Korea out of Turkey, we warned the Kremlin that there’d be no sanctuary inside Russia. They took a look at the board and resigned the game. Then in ‘fifty-eight, after the Iraq king was assassinated, we grabbed the initiative and landed Marines in Lebanon. We got there fastest. They saw that we were ready, and could not be surprised. They were caught off balance, and didn’t dare move. This time it’s different. They’re ready to go through with it, because the odds have changed.”
“How can you know this?”
“Remember reading about the Russian General who came over, in Berlin? An air general, a shrewd character, a human being. He brought us their War Plan, in his head. This time, they’re not resigning the game. They’d still like to win the war without a war, but if we make any military countermove, we’re going to receive it.”
For a moment, they were both silent. On the other side of the flight-line fence, three ground-crewmen were throwing a baseball. Two were pitching, an older sergeant, built like Yogi Berra, catching. The plate was a yellow parachute pack. The ball whirred and plopped sharply into mitt. “That tall boy has a lot of stuff,” Randy said. Again, he felt he moved in the miasma of a dream. Something was wrong. Either Mark shouldn’t be talking like this, or those airmen shouldn’t be throwing a baseball out there in the warm sunlight. When he lit a cigarette, his fingers were trembling again.
“Have a bad night, Randy?”
“Not particularly. I’m having a bad day.”
“I’m afraid it’s going to get worse. Here’s the tactical part. They know that the only way they can do it is knock off our nuclear capability with one blow-or at least cripple us so badly that they can accept what retaliatory power we have left. They don’t mind losing ten or twenty million people, so long as they sweep the board, because people, per se, are only pawns, and expendable. So their plan-it was no surprise to us-calls for a T.O.T. on a worldwide scale. You get it?”
“Sure. Time-on-target. You don’t fire everything at the same instant. You shoot it so it all arrives on target at the same instant.” Mark glanced at his watch, and then looked up at the big jet transport, still loading fuel through four hoses from the underground tanks. “That’s right. It won’t be Zero Hour, it’ll be Zero Minute. They’ll use no planes in the first wave, only missiles. They plan to kill every base and missile site in Europe and Africa and the U.K. with their T-2 and T-3 IR’s. They plan to kill every base on this continent, and in the Pacific, with their IC’s, plus missiles launched from subs. Then they use SUSAC – that’s what we call their Strategic Air Force-to mop up.”
“Can they get away with it?”
Three years ago they couldn’t. Three years hence, when we have our own ICBM batteries emplaced, a big fleet of missile toting subs, and Nike-Zeus and some other stuff perfected, they couldn’t. But right now we’re in what we call `the gap.’ Theoretically, they figure they can do it. I’m pretty sure they can’t we may have some surprises for them-but that’s not the point. Point is, if they think they can get away with it, then we have lost.”
“I don’t understand.”
“LeMay says the only way a general can win a modern war is not fight one. Our whole raison d’etre was deterrent force. When you don’t deter them any longer, you lose. I think we lost some time ago, because the last five Sputniks have been reconnaissance satellites. They’ve been mapping us, with infrared and transitor television, measuring us for the Sunday punch.”
Randy felt angry. He felt cheated. “Why hasn’t anybody everybody been told about this?”
Mark shrugged. “You know how it is-everything that comes in is stamped secret or top secret or cosmic or something and the only people who dare declassify anything are the big wheels right at the top, and the people at the top hold conferences and somebody says, `Now, let’s not be hasty. Let’s not alarm the public.’ So everything stays secret or cosmic. Personally, I think everybody ought to be digging or evacuating right this minute. Maybe if the other side knew we were digging, if they knew that we knew, they wouldn’t try to get away with it.”
“You really think it’s that close?” Randy said. “Why?”
“Two reasons. First, when I left Puerto Rico this morning
Navy was trying to track three skunks-unidentified submarines-in the Caribbean, and one in the Gulf.”
