Another thing that General Bogan had disliked was the smell of the room. All of the dozens of desks on the long sloping floor of the War Room were in fact electrical consoles, which contained thousands of electrical units each coated with a thin layer of protective shellac. When all of the consoles were warmed up the smell of shellac became thin and acrid, slightly sickening.
It had taken General Bogan a long time to forget the old familiar smells of airplanes. These were the muscular and masculine odors of great engines, the kerosene stink of jets, the special private smell of leather and men’s sweat which hung in every pilot’s cockpit.
For months the War Room had seemed effete and too delicate and also quite unbelievable. With time General Bogan had changed. He came to realize that the desks, small and gray, were incredibly intricate. The quiet, low- pitched, gray and trim room was enormously deceptive. Simplicity was its mask. Its primness hid an intricacy and complexity that, when fully apprehended, was almost an artistic concept. By radio, teletype, message, written report, letter, computers, memory banks, card sorters, conveyors, tubes, telephones, and word of mouth, information came to the War Room. It came in the form of calculations, fear, courage, intuition, deduction, opinion, wild guesses, half-truths, facts, statistics, recommendations, equivocations, rumor, informed ignorance, and ignorant information; all were put through a rigorous procedure with one of two conclusions. Either a statement was a fact or it was expressed as a probability of fact.
General Bogan looked at Raskob and wished he could communicate his secret vision. The War Room had become a ship, a plane, a command, a place of decision. Although locked in hundreds of tons of concrete and millions of tons of earth the room gave him a curious sense of motion. Perversely, the descent by elevator came to have something of the excitement of the takeoff. From his desk, in the front center of the room, he had the impression of flying, and flying entirely on instruments. He also came to respect the crew of this strange vehicle of his imagination. They were professional, every bit as professional as any air crew he had ever commanded. He was not the faceless servant, an automatic cog, in an elaborate machine. The War Room was the most delicate of man-machines. Most of the time the machines received, analyzed, and made the decision. But just often enough it had been made clear to him that he was the commander. He was still in the profession of making decisions.
General Bogan knew that his visitors’ eyes were probably now adjusted enough so that they could walk down the incline to the Command Desk.
“Colonel Cascio, will you project the naval situation in the Pacific on the Big Board?” General Bogan said, starting to walk down the slight incline.
“Yes, sir,” Colonel Cascio said and walked briskly ahead of the party. By the time they reached the big central desk he had pressed down a lever labeled PACIFIC, NAVAL. Instantly the picture on the Big Board began to dissolve. The Mercator projection of the world disappeared. For a moment the screen was blank. Then in sharp strong outline the entire screen was covered by a map of the Pacific Ocean. Colonel Casdo looked up at General Bogan. “Would you like to start with the Russian submarine layout?” Colonel Cascio asked.
General Bogan nodded agreement. Colonel Cascio pushed two levers. Suddenly the map of the Pacific contained sixteen red blips. At the same time a small machine at a nearby desk began to click and a tape poured out of its side. One of the red blips seemed to be only a few inches off of Los Angeles. Another was a foot or so due west of Pearl Harbor. The remainder were scattered around the Pacific.
Raskob went rigid. Unthinkingly he jammed his fedora on his head.
“Well, sweet Jesus, you don’t mean to tell me that all those little things are Russian submarines?” Raskob asked. “That one there looks like it’s almost in Los Angeles harbor.”
“Sir, that Soviet submarine is approximately fifty miles from Los Angeles harbor, and in or under the high seas of the Pacific,” General Bogan said quietly. “Unless they come within the three-mile limit or give signs of acting in an aggressive manner all we can do is observe them.”
“Look, General, this looks dangerous to me,” Raskob said, “What the hell are they doing with submarines that dose to our shores?”
“I would presume they are doing the same thing that we do when we send U-2 planes and surveillance satellites around and sometimes over the Soviet border or set up radar stations in Turkey. They are scanning us.”
It was the kind of explanation that Raskob understood. He relaxed slightly. When he spoke his voice had a new hardness.
“How do you know that those submarines are Russian and that they are really there?” he asked.
“Sir, the Navy has spread a pattern of sonobuoys around the Pacific,” Colonel Cascio said. “They are extremely sensitive instruments and they pick up any kinds of sounds that are made any place in the Pacific. The information is transmitted to Kaneohe Bay in Hawaii and interpreted by a sailor-specialist there. The specialists are so good that they can tell the difference between a whale breaking wind and a submarine blowing tanks.”
Colonel Cascio turned to the machine on the adjoining desk and tore off the tape. He handed it to Raskob. “When the Big Board is switched to a specific projection a signal is tripped and simultaneously the various memory banks which store millions of bits of information are automatically searched for bits which are keyed to the projection. These come out on the tape.”
The four men bent over the tape which was stretched out on the desk. The first sentence read, “Soviet submarine Kronstadt, two torpedo tubes, operated radar equipment for 30 seconds at 1820 slant line 18 slant line 00. Submerged depth 120 feet, proceeded northwest to point WLDZ at 6.5 knots.” The tape went on to give estimates of the fuel level in various Soviet submarines in the Pacific, the number of messages they had transmitted, the time they had been on patrol.
“If we wanted we could tap another memory bank and get the complete strategic information on the Russian submarine situation around the entire world,” General Bogan said. “That would include the percentage of their national steel product that has gone into submarines, how many of them are nuclear powered, how many have atomic missiles. Almost anything.”
“I’ll be damned,” Raskob said. “That’s a nice gadget.”
“That gadget and the other gadgets in this room cost over a billion dollars, Mr. Raskob,” General Logan said, carefully keeping any irony out of his Voice. “There is another room like this at the Pentagon and another at Colorado Springs. There are also several smaller versions at other locations around the world. There are also a number of planes, one of which is in the air at all times, which give a miniature version of this same information.”
“Where are all these other rooms?” Raskob asked.
“I’m sorry, sir, but I cannot give you that information except on orders from my superiors or the President,” General Bogan said. He hesitated and then went on, warned by the flush on Raskob’s face. “It’s what we call ‘top secret for concerned eyes only.’ That means that only those people who have a need for the information and can demonstrate that need have access to the information.”
Suddenly Raskob smiled. “That rules me out,” he said. “The only use I could have for the information would be to sell it to the Communists or use it to beat hell out of the military people at an appropriation hearing. What other kind of stuff can you show up on that board?”
Colonel Cascio leaned toward the levers on the desk. Before he touched them, however, a blue light began to flash over the Big Board. It flashed quickly a half-dozen times and then glowed steadily. The levers on the desk snapped back to neutral position without being touched by Colonel Cascio’s fingers. General Bogan and Colonel Cascio stared at the Big Board. Already it had gone into another dissolve. A ticker machine at another desk-console started to stutter. The screen went blank and then steadied down on a large projection of the area between Greenland and Canada. From a door at the side of the room six officers entered and moved to various desks. As instruments and scopes at the desks went on the illumination began to brighten the room.
Both Raskob and Knapp were staring at the board and glancing around the room with fascination.
“What’s happened, General?” Raskob asked.
“I don’t know yet,” General Bogan said. Nothing in his manner indicated there was any cause for concern. “All I know is that we have gone to Condition Blue, which is our lowest position of readiness.” He glanced at Colonel Cascio.
Colonel Cascio turned and walked over to the machine that was stuttering. He looked at the tape and then tore it off. By the time he returned to the desk the map had steadied down and a tiny bright red blip showed between Greenland and the eastern coast of Canada.
“Gentlemen, that is an unidentified flying object which has been picked up by our radar,” General Bogan said,
