“A whole wing is going off,” Margaret said. “I guess I won’t see Red today.” She plugged in the waffle iron and began to mix batter. “You know what they do to us sometimes? They scramble the whole wing, or even the whole division, and the men don’t know whether it’s the real thing or not until they’re up in the air.” She looked at Katy. “You don’t think this could be the real thing, do you?”
“I don’t know,” Katy said, and thought of her brother, Clint, who would be with Red Gresham. She had no doubt, now, that there had been an alert, but she could not say this to Margaret, without also giving the reasons for her belief.
The radio in the kitchen was on, giving out Sunday music, more subdued than weekday music. The bright Florida sun stained the table, and outside the window poinsettias nodded their gaudy heads against the screen, as always at Christmas. The radio, like the thrum of the jets, ordinarily was an unobtrusive background. You were never aware of it until it changed its pattern. The music faded and the pattern changed. An announcer’s voice uttered that inevitable preamble to news of disaster, “We interrupt this program…”
They stood perfectly still, Margaret with a pitcher in one hand, spilling a trickle of batter on the smoking griddle.
“…to bring you a news flash from Washington. General Thomas Keatton, Chief-of-Staff of the Air Force, has just announced that the mysterious loss of nine B-99 bombers of the Strategic Air Command has been solved. According to General Keatton, all were destroyed by acts of sabotage committed by officers of the Red Army and Air Force. Three saboteurs have been captured. One of these has killed himself. Two others are now making a full confession. We will bring you further details as soon as they are received.”
Margaret Gresham turned off the electric waffle iron and set down the pitcher. There was no doubt at all, now, of the whereabouts of her husband. “Please excuse me, Katy,” she said. “I don’t feel hungry.”
“Neither do I,” Katharine said. Having a brother out there was bad, too.
Nine
THERE WAS very little music on the air the rest of that day. Television was cut off entirely, and all radio shifted to the Conelrad stations, designed to confuse incoming bombers, but a crude World War II device at best, of no use against modern radar. And of course V-2 type rockets, fired from submarines, needed neither radio on which to home, nor radar to see, for their course and destination were pre-set.
At ten-eight Katharine and Margaret Gresham were listening when the Navy announced that three enemy submarines had been attacked and probably destroyed in the Atlantic, and another in the Pacific four hundred miles off Seattle. Other contacts had been reported.
At intervals, thereafter, the radio repeated orders from service heads for all soldiers, sailors, and airmen off duty or on leave to report to their stations and bases and ships at once. Katharine felt that she had to call Jess. She had to know what was going on. Knowing nothing of what had occurred at Hibiscus during the night and early morning, she guessed that he had returned to the BOQ at two or three in the morning, slept for a few hours, and been awakened again when Clint was routed out of bed for the alert. So he would be back in Air Division headquarters, either in Conklin’s office or at the exec desk. She went into the hallway and picked up the telephone and asked the base operator for headquarters.
“Is this an official call?” the operator snapped.
“No, but—”
“Sorry.” The phone clicked. So she was cut off from it. She was, after all, only a woman, a woman without duties, of no use in this emergency. She returned to the kitchen and found Margaret Gresham using a dish towel on her face. But not crying, not openly. “I tried to call Jess,” Katharine said. “They wouldn’t put me through.”
“We’ll just have to wait,” Margaret said, “and listen.”
Ten minutes later the Director of Civil Defense spoke. While no enemy aircraft had been sighted on any of the polar approaches to North America, and the situation was still unclear, he felt it his duty to order the evacuation of the ninety-two primary target cities. He hoped everyone would keep calm and listen to the President’s words. The President would speak to the nation at noon.
Katharine opened the kitchen door and looked up. She could count four B-99’s wheeling and climbing against the clean blue sky, and she could hear others. Clint and Red Gresham might be in one of those planes, but she had no way of knowing. Otherwise, she could detect nothing unusual. Two children left the house next door and mounted bicycles, careful not to dirty their Sunday clothes. Their mother, probably, had not turned on the radio that morning, so, for her, life proceeded as usual. The whole country, she supposed, was in a sense like an enormous battlefield. One person could see only a minuscule part of it, and that imperfectly. Margaret called, “I guess we might as well eat. It’s going to be a long day.”
Commander Stephen Batt was in a position to know more. He had driven to Washington early that morning, expecting something, and something had happened. He had gone to the liaison office of the Eastern Sea Frontier, which he judged would be a quickly spurting fountainhead of information on any action at sea. Again, he was right. Patrol bombers, blimps from Lakehurst, Brunswick, and Key West, shore-based dive bombers, and all available surface craft were speeding out to sweep the Eastern Approaches. The carrier Shangri-La, just arrived in Boston to give the crew Christmas leave after a month in Artic waters, turned around and raced out to sea with half a crew. It took on helicopters and key personnel at a rendezvous two hundred miles offshore, a feat which Batt suggested and helped arrange. The hunter-killer task force vacated the Gulf, rounded Key West, and streaked northeast.
Even in the Pentagon it was difficult to grasp the scope of events that followed the Civil Defense Director’s suggestion that the principal cities be evacuated. Of course no one kept calm, and yet the panic that had been feared, and expected, failed to develop. Since it was Sunday, the cities were already empty of commuters. It was Christmas vacation, with children home from school, and so the mindless terror that results when families are disunited in time of crisis was not a problem. When the news came, no business was being conducted except the sale of Christmas trees, gasoline, and Sunday papers. Families were either at home, at church, or on the highways.
Everything that could move on four wheels took to the roads, but this happened, on a lesser scale, on every bright Sunday, even in winter, providing the day was not too cold. There was simply more Sunday driving, and more exasperating traffic jams, than on any other Sunday in history.
Two million people tried to get off Manhattan Island at approximately the same moment, and by all previous estimates this should have resulted in disaster and carnage. But it was Sunday, and a transportation system capable of handling three or four millions in the weekday rush hours, while momentarily flustered, was not disorganized or strangled. Within a few hours the highways radiating from the New York area were black with refugee armies.
It was the countryside, not the cities, that suffered heavily. The city dwellers, in cars, trucks, busses, riding bicycles, and afoot, moved across the landscape like hordes of locusts or migrating army ants. Stocks of food vanished from the roadside inns and diners, then from suburban super-markets, and finally from the most remote country stores. The smarter owners and managers of grocery and hardware stores opened their doors and disposed of their stock in a manner more or less orderly. In some communities windows were smashed and there was looting, for there is a lawless element that waits to prey on its fellow humans in any disaster. Remembering the shortages of the World War II, housewives bought up all the cigarettes and coffee they could find. Whisky almost instantly was selling at a premium, and so were shovels. Millions were digging in.