«Somebody lied, I guess.»
«Oh, my God!» screamed Samuel Lansing Devereaux, as he ran across the huge foyer of Norwegian rose marble and raced up the winding staircase to the east wing of the house.
«Reduce power for final approach,» said the pilot calmly, looking out the side left window, wondering briefly if his wife had made the roast beef hash she had promised him for dinner. «Prepare full flaps, please.»
«Colonel Gibson?» The radio operator sharply intruded on his thoughts.
«Hoot’s on the toot, Sergeant. What is it?»
«You’re not plugged into the tower, sir!»
«Oh, sorry, I just switched them off. Anyway, it’s a beautiful sunset and we’ve got our instructions, and I have every confidence in my first officer and in you, you great communicator.»
«Switch over, Hoot!… I mean, Colonel.»
The pilot snapped his head over at his co-pilot, astonished to see his subordinate’s open mouth and bulging eyes.
«They can’t do this!» cried the first officer under his breath.
«Do what, for Christ’s sake?» Gibson instantly flipped on the tower frequency. «Repeat the information, please. The flight deck was in the middle of a crap game.»
«Funny man, Colonel, and you can tell that gentleman sky-jock on your right that we can do it, because it’s a direct order from Rec-Wing command, sir.»
«I repeat, please repeat. The gentleman-jock’s in shock.»
«So are we, Hoot!» came a second familiar voice from the tower, a fellow officer of Gibson’s rank. «We’ll fill you in when we can, but right now follow the sergeant’s instructions to your refueling coordinates.»
«Refueling …? What the hell are you talking about? We’ve done our eight hours! We scanned up the Aleuts and into the Bering so close to the Mother we could smell her borscht. It’s time for dinner, for roast beef hash, to be exact!»
«Sorry, I can’t say any more. We’ll bring you back as soon as we can.»
«An alert?»
«Not Mother Borscht, I can tell you that much.»
«That much isn’t enough, especially that much. Are the little lucite people on their way from Quasar Tinkerbell?»
«We’re operating direct on CINCSAC with SCD controls, is that enough for you, Hoot?»
«It’s enough to louse up my roast beef hash,» replied a subdued Gibson. «Call my wife, will you?»
«Sure. All spouses and/or live-in relations will be apprised of the change in orders.»
«Hey, Colonel!» interrupted the first flight officer. «There’s a little place in downtown Omaha, on Farnam Street, called Doogies. Around eight o’clock there’ll be a redhead at the bar—dimensions roughly thirty-eight, twenty-eight, thirty-four, and she answers to the name of Scarlet O. Would you mind sending—»
«That’ll be enough, Captain, you’re out of order!… Did you say Doogies?»
The mammoth EC-135 jet, known as «Looking Glass» for the Strategic Air Command’s neverending search of the skies, angled upward, accelerating airspeed to an initial altitude of eighteen thousand feet, where it banked northeast across the Missouri River, leaving Nebraska and entering the state of Iowa. On the ground, the tower at Offutt Air Force Base, the control center for worldwide Strategic Air Command, instructed Colonel Gibson to switch to a coded northwest heading and rendezvous in the still bright western sky with its refueling cargo aircraft.
There could be no argument. The 55th Strategic Reconnaissance Wing was the host unit at Offutt and conducted global-scale observation missions, but, host or not, it, too, like its brother 544th Strategic Intelligence Wing, was subject to the needs of the Cray X-MP supercomputer, which was conveniently placed under the ostensible control of AFGWC, otherwise known as the Air Force Global Weather Control, and which few sophisticated students of SAC believed had anything to do with meteorology.
«What’s going on down there?» asked Colonel Gibson.
«What the hell will be going on at Doogies, that’s what I’d like to know,» said the young, angry captain. «Shit!»
At the Pentagon, in the beflagged office of the omnipotent Secretary of Defense, a tiny man with a pinched face and a slightly askew toupee sat on three cushions behind an enormous desk and virtually spat into his telephone.
«I’ll screw ’em! By God, I’ll ream those ungrateful savages until they beg for poison, and I won’t even let them have that! Nobody’s going to mess around with me… I’m keeping those 135s in the air in force if I have to keep refueling night and day!»
«I’m on your side, Felix,» said the somewhat bewildered chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, «but then I’m not air force. Don’t we have to let them come down every now and then? You’ll have four 135s in the air by tomorrow afternoon, all out of Offutt, and that’s the cutoff time. Couldn’t we share the load with the other SAC bases?»
«No way, Corky. Omaha’s the control center, and we’re not giving it up! Haven’t you ever seen the Duke’s movies? Once you let those bloodthirsty redskin scum have an inch, they’ll sneak up behind you and take your scalp!»
«But what about the aircraft, the crews?»
«You don’t know anything, Corky! Haven’t you ever heard of ‘Beam me up, Scotty,’ and ‘Beam me down, Scotty’?»
«Maybe I was in Nam.»
«Get with it, Corky!» The Secretary of Defense slammed down the telephone.
Brigadier General Owen Richards, supreme commandant of the Strategic Air Command, stared silently at the two men from Washington, both dressed in black trench coats and dark sunglasses under dark brown hats, which they had not removed even in the presence of the female air force major who had escorted them into his office. That discourtesy Richards had ascribed to a nonsexist military, which he had never really accepted; he usually opened a door for his secretary and she was only a sergeant, but she was also a woman, and some things were just natural. No, it was not the lack of courtesy on the Washingtonians’ part, it was the fact that they were lunatics, which probably accounted for their wearing their heavy trench coats and their dark hats on a warm summer’s day, and not removing their smoked sunglasses in the decidedly dim light of the general’s office; all the Venetian blinds were closed to block out the blinding rays of the setting sun. No, thought Owen, they were just crazy. Nuts!
«Gentlemen,» he began calmly, in spite of his apprehensions, which had caused him to quietly open a lower drawer, where there was a weapon. «Your credentials got you in here, but perhaps you’d better give them to me for personal verification… Don’t reach under your coats or I’ll blow you both away!» roared Richards suddenly, yanking his GI-issue .45 out of the drawer.
«You asked for our IDs,» said the man on the left.
«How do you expect us to show them to you?» asked the man on the right.
«Two fingers!» ordered the general. «If I see a full hand, you’re both splattered into the wall.»
«Your combat background makes you inordinately suspicious.»
«You’ve got that right, I spent two years in Washington… Put ’em on the desk.» Both did so. «Goddamn it, these aren’t IDs. They’re handwritten notes!»
«With a signature you must certainly recognize,» said the agent on the left. «And a telephone number—which you certainly know—should you care to embarrass yourself with verification.»