McCabe took the call on the extension in the study. “What’s so important that it won’t wait until morning?” he demanded.
“I wouldn’t like to talk about it on the phone. I think I’d better come on over.”
“Oh, come now. Let’s not be security-happy.”
Simmons was a little rattled. He didn’t know McCabe very well. He said, “Mr. McCabe, this is a matter of the national safety.” The phrase, “a matter of the national safety,” was used seldom, and never recklessly, in the Department. Its meaning was at once literal and cabalistic. It meant: “Drop everything else. This is of supreme importance.”
McCabe was not aware of the phrase. “What do you mean?”
“I’d better come on over.”
“Now look, Simmons, I’m entertaining some very important people. You’d better give me a general idea of what you want.”
Ever since he had been created a Foreign Service Officer, Class Eight, Simmons had been taught to take it for granted that all phone calls over unscrambled wires were monitored. He had been told never to say anything into a telephone that you would not care to have broadcast over the NBC combined network. So he found it difficult to phrase what he had to say. “I’d better start in at the beginning. We have been working on this forecast, and it must be got out immediately, and now our group has been abolished by General Clumb. You know he’s . . .”
“Simmons, are you drunk?”
“Certainly not!”
“Well, you sound drunk.”
“Mr. McCabe, I don’t drink!”
“Well, whatever this is, take it up through the proper channels. Goodbye!”
McCabe returned to the living room, smiled, and said, “Hope you’ll pardon me. Some sort of intramural scrap in the Pentagon.” 8
Commander Batt had better luck than Simmons. Since he was of an old Navy family, he had no trouble seeing Admiral Blakeney, and he was able to tell the whole story, in detail. Blakeney, who was also aware of the thirty missing Russian submarines, and the flotilla that had slipped out of the Baltic, was already somewhat worried, and he promised to take action. He could not, he explained, interfere with whatever was going on in the organization of the Joint Chiefs, which after all was on a higher echelon. He could, however, act directly, in his capacity as commander, Eastern Sea Frontier.
There was a hunter-killer task force, two light carriers and six destroyers, under his command. Unfortunately, at that moment the ships were steaming into the Gulf to co-operate with Air Force in the search for the B-99 missing from Louisiana, and on the way they would scout for the two lost off Florida the day before. There would be an uproar, and renewal of inter-service friction, if he called them off on the basis of no tangible threat. As soon as the survivors were found, or the search abandoned, he could use the task force, with its helicopters and dive bombers, for other duty; and the patrol bombers based at Jacksonville, Virginia Beach, and Quonset as well. Batt had to be satisfied with that. 9
Colonel Cragey, Felix Fromburg, Jesse Price, and Katharine Hume could not get through to anyone of influence and importance that day. Air Force, naturally, was in an uproar, and General Keatton constantly in conference. Four of the AEC commissioners had returned to their home towns for Christmas, and Katharine did not know the fifth.
She did, however, speak to a colleague, Dr. Nebel, a scientist of awesome reputation for his work on the H-bomb. “I think you will find,” Dr. Nebel told her, “that the National Security Council is already aware of this threatening situation if it already exists. We—that is, the AEC—might be making fools of ourselves if we called it to their attention.”
“I don’t believe it,” Katharine said. “If this attack is coming off, and the Security Council is aware of it, certainly they would have informed Civil Defense—and I’m pretty sure that hasn’t happened.”
“I’m not at all sure that they’d tell Civil Defense,” the scientist said, “unless attack was actually imminent. Think of the risk of panic. Orderly evacuation plans or not, there’d just be a wholesale rush to get out of the cities. New York traffic is paralyzed when one truck gets stuck for an hour in the Holland Tunnel. Imagine what would happen if two million people tried to get off Manhattan Island at the same moment. No, they wouldn’t say anything until the last minute. Any premature warning would immobilize whatever defensive dispositions the Army and Air Force plan to take. If word of it leaked, nothing would move—except through the air.”
Katharine wasn’t satisfied. “You know people on the National Security Council, don’t you?” she asked.
“Yes, I do.”
“Couldn’t you make an inquiry, unofficially?”
Dr. Nebel hesitated. “I suppose I could, but I’m not going to. To tell you the truth, Miss Hume, on principle I am against interference in political affairs by people in our position. We have our job to do, they have theirs. Whenever we step into their territory, we antagonize them and invite distrust.”
So Katharine had gone home, and to bed. At midnight the phone rang. It was Jess Price. He asked what she’d been able to do, and she said nothing. He said, “I tried to get Keatton all afternoon, and all evening. An hour ago I went out to eat. When I came back he had left his office. He’s on the way to Hibiscus.”
“Not another?” she said.
“No, not another. Not any since the one from Lake Charles this morning.”
She told him, in guarded words, about her disappointing talk with Dr. Nebel. He expressed no surprise. Then she said, “Jess, are you terribly tired?”
“No. Only my eye is tired. I’ve been reading.” He didn’t tell her what he had been reading, while waiting in the hope of seeing Keatton. He had been reading a new, and exciting, top secret report out of Wright Field. There had been a breakthrough in the development of the intercontinental ballistics missile.
It was eleven o’clock. She said, “Would you like to come up to my apartment for a drink, or a coffee?”
He said, “I’ll be right there.”
She hung up the phone, wondering at the boldness of her invitation, trying to analyze her feelings. He certainly wasn’t the type that needed mothering. He was at least as self-sufficient as herself. The truth was, she decided, that she simply felt better when he was around. The days on which she didn’t see him at all, those days seemed empty. This feeling for Jess was not new, but she could not tell exactly when it had begun.
As Jesse left the Pentagon, the guards were busy collecting the day’s secret waste. One of the bags, taken from the Joint Chiefs’ wing to the incinerators in the basement and burned, contained nineteen of the twenty existing copies of FORECAST OF RUSSIAN MILITARY ACTION.
Four
AIRMAN 2/c Stanley Smith was fifteen minutes late reporting for duty on the midnight to 0800 shift at the Officers’ Open Mess, Hibiscus Base, Wednesday. It was unusual for Smith to be late, and Sergeant Ciocci, in charge of five cooks and food handlers, said only, “What held you up, Stan?”
“They took the bus apart at the main gate,” Smith answered. Not only had the Air Police checked the ID cards and leave passes on every man aboard the bus, including the driver, but they had opened every suitcase and parcel.
“It’s rough all over,” said Ciocci. “The way they act out on the line, you’d think somebody was stealing those Nine-Nines. I cut across a hard stand coming from Barracks Thirty-one and the next thing I knew I was flat on my face and a grease monkey was kneeling on my spine and had a forty-five against the back of my head. They didn’t let me up until Captain Kuhn came over from his quarters and identified me. Kuhn will be nasty tomorrow. They had to get him out of the sack.” Captain Kuhn was mess officer.