He lingered at the window a moment or two longer. The mild May sun filled the courtyard. Except for tatters of cloud in the southwest, the sky was clear blue. This was the kind of day when a man wished he had a country place, a chair under a big shade tree, and maybe a couple of horses.
Horses. So Gentleman Jim had a pool on the Preakness, huh? Casey grinned. That was the fox in Scott, lulling his top field commanders with a line of chatter about a horse race which would be run off the same day as the All Red alert.
The last All Red, six weeks ago, had pleased no one. Two carrier attack forces were caught in port, half their ships tied up for minor repairs that should have been completed weeks earlier. Only a little more than a third of the SAC planes got into the air on time. Bits of snafu had leaked into the press from half a dozen bases around the world. President Lyman had telephoned twice to find out what was the matter and Scott, who rarely lost his temper, got mad.
The result was a decision to schedule another no-warning exercise this week. For this one the time was closely held. The Joint Chiefs set the date only last Thursday and so far only the five of them, plus the President, Casey and Colonel George Murdock, Scott's personal aide, knew of it. Scott himself picked out the time: this coming Saturday, May 18, at 1900 hours Greenwich Mean Time, 3 p.m. daylight time in Washington.
Not even the Secretary of Defense knew of the plan. Casey had asked Scott about this, only to be told that the President specifically ordered it that way. There was a growing coolness between the Secretary and the President. Perhaps Lyman thought he would catch the Secretary off guard.
Casey believed Saturday's All Red would be a pretty good test of the remedial measures that had been rushed since the fiasco in late March. Certainly the timing would show whether the field commanders had performed as ordered. By 3 p.m. Saturday in Washington, most United States commands would be well into their usual peacetime weekend cycle. If Moscow ever did push the button, you could be sure it wouldn't be between 9 a.m. Monday and 4:30 p.m. Friday.
Now Scott was handing five of his top men in the field a little extra tranquilizer with his message on the Preakness, even setting the "post time" to coincide with the hour he had picked to blow the whistle for the alert. Pretty cute, Casey thought. Some of those people might relax an extra notch, surmising that Scott was sure to be up at Pimlico for the race.
The girl in the courtyard had slipped her head onto the shoulder of the shirt-sleeved clerk as they lazed away their lunch hour in the sun. Casey pulled himself away from the window and continued along the corridor to the guarded door of the all-service code room. Inside, it was largely a Navy operation. Four sailors with headsets manned typewriters. Another door, this one black with "No Admittance" painted on it in large white letters, led into the cryptographic center where young Hough spent most of his time. But today Hough was slouched at an empty desk in the outer room, reading the Sunday comics.
"Hiya, Colonel," he offered. "You got some work for my tigers?"
Casey handed him the envelope. Hough riffled through the messages, pulled out those which he would have to encode himself, and distributed the rest to the operators. Casey nodded to him and started to leave, but Hough tapped his elbow.
"Take a look at this, Colonel."
Casey took the flimsy. It was a copy of an incoming dispatch:
SCOTT, JCS, WASHINGTON
NO BET. BUT BEST RGDS AS EVER.
BARNSWELL, COMSIXTHFLT
"Which proves," Hough said, "that even an admiral sometimes can't get up ten bucks for a bet. Or maybe he thinks it would set a bad example for the fleet."
"If you don't quit sticking your nose into Scott's business," Casey said, "you're likely to wind up setting a good example by being shipped off to the Aleutians."
"Come on, Colonel. Hawaii would be far enough. In fact, Pearl would be just swell. I told Murdock this morning that instead of worrying about horses, he ought to do this stinking town a favor and get me a transfer to the islands. I'd reduce the confusion, don't you think?"
"You sure would, Dorsey, but what have we got against Hawaii? The Aleutians need men like you," Casey said, "to make the Eskimos safe for democracy."
Casey sauntered along the hall and entered the senior officers' dining room for lunch. It was, like the rest of the building, almost empty. A cluster of Navy and Air Force officers crowded around one table. An Army officer, alone at a table in the rear, stood up and waved at Casey.
"Hi, Jiggs!" Casey walked over, pleasantly surprised to see a friend, Mutt Henderson, a Signal Corps light colonel he'd met in the Iranian War three years ago. Only now, judging from the insignia, it was Colonel William Henderson.
"Hey, Mutt, when did you get the chickens?" Casey snapped a finger against the eagle on Henderson's left shoulder, then thumped him on the back. "Good to see you. What brings you here?"
"Somebody's got to straighten you chairborne soldiers out once in a while," Henderson replied. His black eyes were wide and a familiar impish grin creased his round, red face.
Casey ordered a sandwich and iced tea and the two men settled back to look each other over. This, Casey thought, is what I like about the service. A civilian has three or four close friends at the most. A military man can claim them by the dozen. At almost every post a man could find an officer or a noncom with whom he had shared a few seconds of danger, a few months of boredom, a bottle or perhaps a girl. Your past was always around you. You could never pretend you were something you were not; there were always too many who knew too much.
For Casey and Henderson the sharing had included both danger and boredom, as well as a few bottles. They first met on a rainy night in Iran when Henderson, pulling the lead end of a field telephone wire, slid into the foxhole from which Casey was trying to run his battalion. They remained neighbors, and became fast friends, in the months that followed.
Casey bit into his sandwich and leaned forward.
"All right, Mutt, give me the current statistics. Where're you stationed?"
Henderson dropped his voice. "I haven't given a straight answer to that in four months. But with your clearance you know it all anyway. Hell, Jiggs, you probably got me my orders. I'm exec of ECOMCON."
Casey managed a knowing smile. He had never heard of ECOMCON, but if he had learned anything since Annapolis in addition to the techniques of boot-blacking, it was never to let on when you didn't know. Not that there was much of that now, with such unhappy little items as the location of every nuclear warhead in the nation stuffed into his head. A director of the Joint Staff couldn't very well function without knowing these things. Casey surmised Henderson must be using some trick local name for a unit he would know by another designation. He probed lightly.
"So you hate the assignment. Well, don't blame me for your orders, pal. You live on the base?"
Henderson snorted. "Christ, no. Nobody could live in that hellhole. It's bad enough when the Old Man makes me stay there four or five days at a time, the ornery son-of-a-bitch. No, Mabel and I got a little house in El Paso."
He pulled a memo pad out of his pocket and scribbled on it.
"There's my home phone in case you get down there. You know Site Y hasn't got an outside phone on the place except the C.O.'s personal line."
Casey prompted again. "I hear you're doing a pretty fair job for a country boy. How many men you got now? Seems to me I remember you're not up to strength yet."
"Sure we are," Henderson said. "We got the full T.O.-100 officers, 3,500 enlisted. The last ones came in a couple weeks ago. But you know, Jiggs, it's funny. We spend more time training for seizure than for prevention. If I didn't know better I'd think someone around Scott had a defeatist complex, like the Commies already had the stuff and we had to get it back."