“Sodium pentathol is also called truth serum, Mr. Smith,” Lundstrom said. “It’ll make you feel wonderful. You’ll soar like a bird, and you’ll sing like one.”
Smith opened his eyes and looked up, to search the colonel’s face and see whether he was serious. This was wholly unfair, something worse than torture. The thought of being unable to control his tongue appalled him. So long as he could control his tongue he had a chance of living until Monday. He could stretch out an interrogation. He could lead this inhuman colonel into a hundred rhetorical cul-de-sacs. But he knew what would happen under an injection of truth serum. He would tell everything, quickly. Once he had told everything, somebody might decide to kill him, quickly. Smith spoke for the first time. “It is contrary to the laws of war to do anything like that. I am an officer of the Red Army.”
They were silent.
“I demand to be treated as an officer!”
“Well, no,” Lundstrom said. “You’re either a traitor, or a spy, maybe both. You’re in the wrong uniform, buster, to be treated as a Red officer.”
A young flight surgeon came into the interrogation room. “I hear you’ve got a saboteur, and he had an accident,” he said, smiling.
“Yes,” Lundstrom said, “his neck got caught in Major Price’s hands. He needs about seven and a half grains of sodium pentathol, and damn’ fast. He wants to talk, but we haven’t got time for lies or political lectures. Stick him, Doctor!”
Smith watched the flight surgeon bring a packet of hypodermic needles out of his bag. He felt dejected. Perhaps he was wrong about the Americans. Perhaps they knew more about warfare than a man would realize. Either that, or they were so lucky you could think they were smart. His sleeve was being rolled up, and he gritted his teeth as the needle thudded into his arm, not gently.
Jesse left them, reeling. He was too exhausted to call Katy. 8
Had it not been for one man, or rather one man’s confidence in another man, the course of events and even the final result might have been different. The one man was Admiral Kitteredge, aboard the Coral Sea. When the admiral was ordered to load helicopters and sub-killing dive bombers instead of conventional jet bombers and fighters, and steam north, the admiral sensed a deeper disquiet in the Navy Department than the message text conveyed. To convert a powerful attack carrier, capable of strategic action against the enemy in distant waters, into an anti-submarine vessel was a drastic move. Kitteredge knew that a regular hunter-killer task force was just around the horn of the Florida Keys. What was the big rush? While the new loading was going on, the admiral went ashore to confer with Captain Clyde, the Mayport facilities commander. He especially wanted Clyde’s opinion of the queer story told by a Marine of the landing a few miles down the coast. The admiral knew Clyde, who had served with him in battleships, as a level-headed, sagacious man. The admiral was aware that except for one slip, on the day of Pearl Harbor, Clyde might have been an admiral also.
Captain Clyde was convinced that the Marine was telling the truth. It was no hoax, he insisted. So the admiral also was convinced. They discussed other matters, going all the way back to the Swedish report of submarines clearing the Skaggerak. Assuming that this force was headed his way, and also assuming that the radar sighting of what could have been a flotilla of subs had been accurate, and the real thing, the admiral visualized where those submarines would be on the curve of the Atlantic at the moment. Then he returned to his ship and wordlashed his force into a loading frenzy. As a result, Coral Sea and escorting destroyers were able to sortie from Mayport three hours ahead of the Navy Department’s optimum hour for sailing. Once in the open ocean, Kitteredge had the Coral Sea’s captain work up his ship to emergency speed, a most uneconomical effort not called for in his orders.
At first light on that Sunday, at a point three hundred miles off the Capes, he launched his helicopters. Thereafter the carrier and its destroyers and helicopters were able to probe an enormous swathe of ocean, more than a hundred miles wide, its length limited only by the ships’ speed.
The helicopters, in a scouting line stretching fifty miles on each flank of the carrier, behaved like bees darting from flower to white-capped flower, seeking nectar. Hovering close to the swells, they lowered a long proboscus of sound gear into the sea, listened for a few seconds for the stealthy beat of propellers beneath, and flew on to another sector.
Two hours after dawn one of the helicopters heard a new sound, something that should not have been there at all, the unmistakable murmur and hum of a submarine’s props whirling under electric or atomic power, deep, very deep, and quite fast. This helicopter called Coral Sea, and the carrier launched four more of what the Navy calls eggbeaters or whirlybirds, and the less romantic Army calls choppers. Soon these, too, buzzed the area, dipping, listening, triangulating, obtaining an exact fix, exact course, exact speed.
With the contact confirmed and pinpointed, the admiral assigned one destroyer and two dive bombers to the kill, and did not tarry. Without being informed by Washington, he was aware that if this was an all-out attack, the largest enemy concentration would lie still to the north, closer to the industrial heart of the country. He was also aware that if such a concentration existed, he had caught it off base, a day and a night’s run from the coast. But he must be quick. With darkness, his most efficient hours for killing would end.
At almost the same time that Coral Sea radioed news of its first contact to Washington, the accounts of what had happened at Hibiscus, Lake Charles, and Corpus Christi exploded in the Pentagon. The Navy was convinced. The plan for defense against submarine attack, involving all ships and naval planes and blimps on both coasts, went into effect. The search for B-99 survivors was abruptly dropped. Now it was proven that the bombers had been blown up, further search for survivors seemed hopeless. Besides, in wartime, casualties can be accepted, and this was already regarded as war. 9
On Sunday morning it was Katharine Hume’s custom to sleep late and breakfast on waffles, and it was the same in the Gresham household, and this Sunday was no different. Still in pajamas, she joined Margaret Gresham in the kitchen at ten o’clock. “Red’s not here,” Margaret said. “I don’t know what happened to him. He wasn’t due to fly today. If there was an alert, or anything, they’d call him, and I didn’t hear the phone ring.”
“I did,” Katy said. “At least I think I did. I didn’t get up because I only heard it ring once.”
“Red must have answered,” Margaret said. She looked around the kitchen. There were no dirty dishes beside the sink, or crumbs on the table. She lifted the silvered percolator. It was cold, and empty. “He didn’t eat any breakfast. Maybe he had an early golf date and ate at the O Club.”
Katy knew that Margaret was expressing a hope rather than a belief, and she was glad Jess was no longer a pilot. It must be hell to wake up in the morning and not know whether your husband was playing golf, five minutes drive away, or a thousand miles out over the Atlantic, fifty thousand feet up, and sitting thirty feet from an H-bomb. “Maybe,” she said, but Margaret wasn’t listening. Her ears were tuned to something else.
The cluster of houses for married officers, alike as the aircraft they flew except for roof colors and shrubbery, was three miles from the flight line, and outside the glass-shattering takeoff zone, and yet the sound of air activity was always with them. After a time the ear grew calloused to the distant din of multijets, and sealed off the sound entirely, just as the city dweller’s ear ignores traffic noises, and the farmer never hears his own chickens. Now, Katy was aware of a change in the sound from the runways, a change in intensity, in volume, in urgency. Katy didn’t know what it meant, but Margaret did.