Pat Frank - Forbidden Area

She stopped at the corner delicatessen and bought cottage cheese and herring pickled in cream, and the early edition of the morning paper. She went up to her apartment, undressed, showered, and washed her hair. She put on a pair of men’s broadcloth pajamas, loose and comfortable, and settled down at the coffee table to eat and read. The paper’s double-banner headline said:

NAVY JOINS AIR FORCE

IN HUNT FOR LOST PLANES

She started reading the story. “All Navy and Coast Guard ships south of Norfolk, and in the Gulf, have joined the Air Force in the search for two B-99 bombers of the 519th Wing. . . .”

She shook the paper. It was impossible. It must be a typographical error. Then she remembered, chillingly, that SAC wings were rotated every sixty or ninety days between bases at home and abroad. Her brother was in the 519th.

She forced herself to hunt for names. There were none. She found a paragraph that began: “Names of the fourteen missing airmen were withheld, pending notification of next of kin.”

The paper fell to the floor and she stared at the telephone, waiting for it to ring, begging it to keep its silence. They were very close, she and her brother, Clint. With both her mother and father gone, Clint was all that was left. He was what maintained the Humes as a family. He was, in every sense, a big brother. He had made it possible for her to finish Sarah Lawrence and go on to M.I.T. He had financed her post-graduate year, urged her on to win her doctorate. He had inflated her confidence until she had courage enough to apply for a job with the Atomic Energy Commission. Then he had staked what influence he had, and enlisted the support of friends of their father, to make sure that she was not turned down because of sex or age. Outwardly, he was casual with her, but when all the rest of the world quaked and shifted, he was a rock.

She thought of Clint, while watching the phone. She watched it for perhaps ten minutes before it rang. 6

It is said that the state of the world can be judged by the number of windows illuminated in the Pentagon at night. When lights burn only in the cubicles of the duty officers and in the code rooms and communications centers on the upper floors, then the world is at peace. In time of crisis, such as the beginning of the Korean War, the French agony in Indo-China, and the week when an invasion fleet massed off Formosa, the building is ablaze. On this foggy night more than half the windows, including all the Air Force corridors, signalled their yellow alert. For the first time in years, the United States was uneasy.

Jesse Price had not left the Pentagon since the conference and did not intend to leave at any time during the night and perhaps the following day. This was no hardship. The Pentagon is not an ordinary building. It is a city, walled and roofed. There are all sorts of shops on the ground level and several of its cafeterias operate around the clock. It has facilities for recreation, health, and cleanliness. There are cots in the duty offices and guardrooms, sleeping quarters in the deep shelters underground, and, of course, comfortable couches in the staff reception rooms, and the suites of the civilian hierarchy. It is possible to live in the Pentagon, with all the amenities, indefinitely.

All afternoon and into the evening Jesse Price shuttled between the Pentagon’s cerebral cortex, the habitat of the Joint Chiefs, and his own small office in an Air Force wing on the opposite side of the building, a quarter of a mile away, poking his long, beaked nose into various intelligence centers on four floors. To find out what is going on in the Pentagon, one needs not only a pleasing personality and some rank, but strong legs and a congenital sense of direction, for it is designed like a maze for the confusion of white rats. At nine o’clock Major Price returned to his office, sent his secretary home, and took off his size eleven shoes. His feet were swollen and his long shanks ached, but he had accumulated a number of facts as unrelated as they were disturbing.

The Pentagon is shaped like a spider web, and beyond its physical confines this shape extends along unseen lines of communication, so that the outer fringe of the web touches the far places of the earth—a shack on an ice island in the Arctic, a consulate in Azerbaijan, an observer on the Kurdish frontier, a naval attaché in Stockholm, an agent deep in the Eastern Zone of Germany, a Constellation nicknamed Pregnant Goose, bulging with radomes, flying in lonely darkness close to the North Pole. Something had ticked the web at all these places, and others.

A Russian reconnaissance plane had penetrated the air spaces over Greenland so deeply that interceptors were sent up from Thule. This was not unusual, but at the same time Russian multi-engined jets, very high and very fast, were probing Alaska and the wastes of northern Canada. Radar on Shemya, at the tip of the Aleutians, had picked up what seemed to be a whole squadron of aircraft maneuvering over the Komandorskis. For many months there had been little suspicious activity in the Far North. Now there it was, suddenly.

Major Price stripped off his socks and lifted his feet to his desk and rubbed the itching, corrugated skin. Was all this an accident of sighting? Was it intensified reconnaissance preparatory to an attack? Or was it a diversion, intended to focus the attention of the Pentagon on the northern strands of its web, and on the air? There was no sense in guessing.

Colonel Cragey and Steve Batt also had collected news, equally puzzling. The Intentions of the Enemy Group used its conference room only for the exchange of ideas and the search for conclusions. The physical preparation of its forecasts went on in another room equipped for the storage of classified documents, its phones monitored, its stenographers and researchers under the jurisdiction of the Top Secret Controllers. It was in this second room that Price had run into Cragey and Batt, and they had swapped information.

The Seventh Fleet, maintaining its vigil over Formosa, detected a shift in military strength in China. For a month there had been a buildup of junks and naval craft in the Chinese coastal waters. This had suddenly ceased. At the same time a squadron of medium jet bombers, believed manned by Russians, had vanished from Chinese coastal air bases.

“That’s strange enough,” Batt had said, “but hear this. We’ve lost about thirty Russian submarines. No radio intercepts. Same thing happened before Pearl Harbor, but that time we lost the Japanese carriers. Of course we often lose a flotilla of Russian subs when they’re in port and don’t send. Still, I’m worried, even if ONI isn’t.”

Navy had another worry. The carrier Forrestal, at sea with a destroyer screen west of Scapa Flow, reported it was being shadowed by a bogey. When the Forrestal catapulted interceptors, the bogey drifted away at great speed, indicating that it too was equipped with powerful radar and had spotted the launch. But the bogey could have been simply a fast trans-Atlantic jet airliner, minding its own business, so the matter was not pegged as serious.

Cragey had contributed a G-2 summary. What was going on in Europe made even less sense than what had occurred in China. All along the Iron Curtain frontiers, Russian armor was pulling back from the borders. This was exactly the reverse of Red Army maneuvers in past times of tension. But who could say that this was a time of tension, except for the loss of the B-99’s, and the extraordinary air activity in the North? There had been no disturbing diplomatic incidents, or unusual political friction.

Price was pulling on his socks and shoes when the phone rang. It was General Keatton’s office. The general was holding a meeting, right away, on the B-99’s. He thought perhaps Major Price would like to attend.