Smith was just stirring out of sleep when Cusack opened the door and said, his voice unnaturally high, “Hey Stan!” Usually, Cusack was careful not to disturb Smith until after he had shaved, because his roommate was grumpy when first awakened.
Smith rolled over on his back and opened his eyes. “Yeah?”
“Hell out on the flight line. Two more Ninety-Nines are gone.”
“Gone?”
“Twenty minutes out on this morning’s mission, and then no radio contact. Like they kept on climbing right into the sky. You ought to hear the crews at lunch. Ape sweat.”
“Too bad,” said Smith.
“Fourteen guys gone. Glad I’m fryin’, not flyin’.”
Smith swung his legs out of bed and stretched. It had been so easy. He said, “Cusack, how about trotting downstairs and getting me a cold Coke?”
“Sure,” Cusack said, and left.
Smith shucked his pajama top and turned on the radio and shaved. Three scragged and he could get two more with the materiel he had on hand. Then he’d have to drive up to that beach between Ponte Vedra and St. Augustine for resupply. His instructions were to start on the third Monday of December, and keep going. He was carrying out his orders. There had been no change except for the test requested the month before.
Four weeks ago he had received a letter from Robert Gumol, president of the First National Bank of Upper Hyannis, Pennsylvania. The letter had been cagily composed, in case it should fall into the hands of the wrong Stanley Smith, or Hibiscus Base mail was being monitored. “If you are the Stanley Smith who has had some experience with Five-Star Electric,” the letter said, “please telephone me concerning a matter that may be of some benefit to you.”
That evening Smith had called Gumol from a pay booth in Orlando. Three days later he was in Upper Hyannis on a seventy-two-hour pass. He had been hoarding his leave for such an eventuality.
Gumol turned out to be a short, heavy-shouldered man, thick through the middle, probably in his late fifties, with the opaque china-blue eyes of a week-old baby, uneven dark splotches marring his pink skin. For a few minutes they chatted about the Florida climate, and other trivialities, in the office of the bank, feeling each other out, and then Gumol had said, “Now, concerning your mission—”
“Everything seems to be going very well,” said Smith.
“How many others came over with you?”
“Don’t you know?”
“Yes, I know.”
Stanley Smith understood that Gumol was just making very sure of his identity, and he said, “Three.”
“Right. Well, two of the others have been shifted around a good deal, and I haven’t heard a word from the third. That’s why I decided to call on you. The home office sent me word that it wants a test. On or about November fifteenth. If the test goes well, you are to continue as before.”
“That all?”
“That’s all the message.”
“Very well. I understand.”
“You can do it?”
“Certainly.” Smith hesitated and added, “I wonder why they want a test?”
Gumol squirmed in his chair and Smith noticed how short and inadequate his legs were, for his heft. When Gumol leaned back in the chair his feet did not quite touch the gray carpet. “To tell you the truth,” Gumol said, “I don’t exactly know what you’re going to do. I wish I did know. If something big is going to happen, they ought to give me time to make plans. They ought to let me know. Do you think anything big—I mean really big—is contemplated?”
“All I know is what I’m supposed to do. I don’t ask questions.”
“Now, don’t misunderstand me,” Gumol said. “I don’t want to know your job. Far from it. I was just thinking of something bigger than any one man, or four men, can do, if you know what I mean.”
“I know what you mean,” said Smith, “but I don’t have the answer.”
“Do you by any chance need extra money?” asked Gumol.
Gumol knew very well that Smith would have asked for money, had he needed it. So Smith understood, correctly, that this was an offer of money in exchange for information. “Not right now, thanks,” he said. He wanted to ask the location of his roommates from Little Chicago, and the identity of the one from whom nothing had been heard. He did not think it politic to do so.
Gumol said, “Well, whatever you’re up to, good luck. I expect I’ll be able to guess on the fifteenth.”
Smith smiled and said, “Yes, I expect you will.”
And he had flown back to Florida.
Now that the plan was operating successfully, with three planes behind him, he too was wondering whether anything bigger would happen. SAC would find the disappearance of two more 99’s big enough. There had been a flap over the first one, with SI men all over the base. Hibiscus would really be in an uproar this day. He decided that this would be a good night to lay low and do nothing, and let Gregg Palmer, Masters, and Johnson carry the ball. If they were in a position to operate, it would take the heat off Hibiscus. It would spread the risk, and make things simpler for himself, and possibly for the others as well.
Smith asked himself, again, why that test in November? He thought he could guess. Military machines, being civilization’s most massive organizations, were sensitive to the laws of motion and inertia. They cannot move instantly into top speed from a standing start. His experience in the engineers’ regiment had taught him this. A battle did not begin when the artillery opened its barrage and the infantry rose from its positions and charged. A battle began when the bridging was brought up, the roads strengthened to support tanks, the ammunition dumps replenished, and partisans struck in the enemy rear. He could envision a meeting of generals in the Kremlin, and one of them saying: “Before we start this, I’d like to know whether our saboteur teams can perform their mission.” Then the order had gone out to him, via Gumol, and he had succeeded. The great locomotive had not yet begun to move, but the exploit of November had set its wheels to spinning.
Cusack came back with the Coke and Smith said, “What’s at the movies tonight?” 4
Robert Gumol did not guess the exact nature of Smith’s mission when the first B-99 vanished on November 15. He realized, of course, that Smith must have had something to do with the disappearance of the aircraft, but at first he believed that Smith, somehow, must have stolen the bomber and delivered it to his Fatherland.
Gumol changed his mind on the third Monday in December. Shortly after two o’clock that afternoon, just as he was about to lock his desk and leave the bank, he heard the news that two more bombers were missing from Hibiscus. All he said to Kirkland, his cashier, was: “Something must be wrong with them.”
Thirty minutes later he joined Al Kauffman, hardware, Lou Stone, real estate, and Pete Kenney, Presto Markets, for golf at the Upper Hyannis Country Club. His game was more abysmal than usual, he couldn’t break 110, and he lost eighteen dollars in the nassau. In the locker room, afterward, he drank two double Scotches. They failed to cheer him. Instead of going directly home from the club he returned to the bank. He sat at his desk and stared at the Rotary Club plaque on the wall, but he was trying to look into the future.
Robert Gumol had come to the United States with his father, a Petrograd banker, at the age of thirteen. The year was 1914, and the world was at war. Everyone thought it would be over in a few months. Unless it was over swiftly, all the warring nations would be bankrupt. No one dreamed that for the next forty-odd years there would be little peace, and that governments would be so constituted that the support of wars would be their principal business. Gumol, senior, was sent to the United States on behalf of the Czar’s treasury, selected for the mission because he spoke fluent English and had married a Scotswoman with banking connections in America. For three years the Gumols lived in hotels in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Washington. Papa Gumol bartered Imperial Russian bonds for dollars, for torpedoes, for bandages and gas masks. Most of his colleagues returned to Russia before the revolution, and perished. But Gumol, senior, with prescience of the terror abuilding, managed to remain in America. After the capitulation of Russia he set up a private bank in Philadelphia, specializing in foreign exchange. At first, he did not do well.