Pat Frank - Forbidden Area

The line edged ahead. Immigration glanced at his passport and asked, casually, how long he expected to stay.

“Only a few days,” Gumol said.

“You’re a banker. Business, I suppose?”

“Yes, business.” He saw that Customs, a thin, mustached man standing at the table beyond Immigration, was listening.

He moved on. To his relief, Customs didn’t reach out for the brief case. Customs said, “Go right ahead, sir. Taxis are across the lobby.” The little fat man, Customs thought, is uneasy because his brief case is stuffed with money. He wants to get the dollars to the bank in a hurry. He thinks that if I force him to open the brief case someone will see the money, and he will be robbed, and indeed he might be. It is best, therefore, that the brief case not be opened at this counter. Cuba didn’t care how much money Americans brought into the country, so long as a portion of it remained.

Once in a cab, Gumol did indeed consider taking the money to the bank, but decided against it. That might be dangerous. Banks, even in Cuba, listed and reported the serial numbers of thousand dollar bills. In time Treasury might inquire about the source of his cash. Havana was the center of money exchange in the Caribbean. In Havana were certain traders who would accept currency, of any denomination, without question or remembrance so long as there was a profit in it. These traders avoided the authorities, and it would be safe to deal with them. They would enable him to diversify his assets. He would buy Argentine and Mexican pesos, quietly and slowly. After a successful attack on the United States, what would dollars be worth? Until he got rid of his dollars, he would stay married to this brief case.

At the Hotel Nacional it was unnecessary for Gumol to show his credit cards. He was remembered. He registered, and was escorted to a double room overlooking the harbor. When the bellhop was gone he took off his clothes and fell on the bed, much relieved. He had made it, with ease and safety, and he felt he was entitled to another drink. He picked up the phone, ordered rum, ice, and Cokes, and remembered that he ought to telegraph his wife and inform her that he had arrived safely. Then he decided not to wire her. She could wait. If she worried, it served her right. Let her sweat a while. The rum came and he mixed a drink and walked out on the balcony. On a similar balcony, one floor below, two girls were standing in the sunshine, their hands on the white-painted iron railing, chatting. One of them, a yellow-haired girl with bright black eyes and dark brows boldly painted, looked up at him and smiled. He raised his glass in a silent toast, and invitation. 2

At the same time that Gumol landed in Havana, PFC Henry Hazen, wearing the smart green of the Marines, arrived in Jacksonville from the West Coast, and then caught a bus to St. Augustine. He had three weeks’ leave, which would extend through the holiday season, before shipping out to Okinawa, and he was on the way to visit his family and see Nina Pope, who had been his girl. Whether she was still his girl was unclear. Her letters had arrived with less and less frequency, and their language was stilted and vague. Eighteen months in the Marines had changed Henry. He had gained twenty-five pounds, his chest filled his uniform jacket, and his legs no longer resembled those of a wobbly colt. Anyone who survives the Corps’ boot camp and combat training course grows quickly to manhood.

Among the realities Hazen had absorbed was that you didn’t join the Marines to learn a trade, in spite of what the recruiting posters said and his family believed. Marines were trained for other things, such as fighting a dangerous and wily enemy. At Pendleton he had been taught the nature of this enemy, and thereafter he brooded often on what he had seen, and what he had failed to do, on a moonlit night in June the year before.

He could not banish it from his mind. He had to tell someone.

The leader of his training platoon, at Pendleton, was a Sergeant Asbury, a onetime professional football player who might have made second string on the Redskins had not the Korean War intervened. At first Asbury had seemed formidable, tough and distant, but after a few weeks Hazen learned that Asbury, when you grew to know him, was human and friendly, like a high school athletic coach. So it was to Asbury that Hazen had confided his story of the submarine. Asbury listened without interruption until Henry came to the part about the Buick rolling off the landing barge. Then Asbury laughed and said, “Sure it was a Buick, Slim?”

“I’m almost certain it was a Buick.”

“Come on, Slim, don’t try to snow me. You’re making this up as you go along, aren’t you?”

“No, this is honest-to-goodness truth. Somebody ought to know about it.”

“Well, why tell me? What can I do?”

“I don’t know.”

“You really saw this?”

“I saw it.”

Asbury looked worried. Maybe the boy had seen a submarine, maybe he hadn’t. Anyway, he thought he had, but he also thought he had seen a car delivered by landing barge, and of course that was ridiculous. Besides, it had all happened more than a year before, and nothing could be done about it now. Asbury had been in the Marines long enough to realize how much trouble a tale like that could cause, if bucked to higher authority and taken seriously. “Know what I’d do if I were you, Slim?” he said. “I’d forget all about it.”

“Forget it? Why?”

“I’ll tell you why,” the sergeant said. “Suppose I take this up with the Captain? Whether he believes you or not, he personally can’t do a thing. He has to buck it to the battalion commander. So what does the Major do? He doesn’t know you, and it sounds real screwy to him. Does he take your word for it and go to the big brass and risk getting laughed at? No, sir. He calls in the post psychiatrist. The psychiatrist talks to you and nods, yes, yes. Then he puts you under observation for two weeks. If you’re still sane after two weeks in the crazy ward, he certifies that you were suffering from a temporary delusion. He says you’ve got an inferiority complex and you were trying to compensate for it by inventing this story to call attention to yourself. So he sends you back to the platoon with a note on your jacket saying you’re emotionally immature and unstable. After that, you’ll never even make corporal. Now, still want to see the Captain?”

Henry knew that Asbury’s reasoning was logical and accurate. It could even be worse. They might kick him out of the Corps with a medical discharge, and after that it would be tough getting a job, any kind of a job, on the outside. He said, “No, don’t tell the Captain. Don’t tell anybody, will you?”

“Okay, Slim,” the sergeant had said. “We’ll just keep it quiet.”

Now, on the bus to St. Augustine, so close to where it had happened, his conscience troubled him again. 3

The alarm clock jolted Katharine out of bed at six-thirty that morning, an hour earlier than usual. She zigzagged into the bathroom, splashed cold water on her face, and the cocoon of sleep began to unravel. She recalled that she had been up until two trying to get her brother, Clint, on the telephone. Sometimes the long distance operator had penetrated as deeply as Orlando, more often she could not get beyond Jacksonville, and she had never reached the switchboard at Hibiscus. All the lines into the base were always busy. She had also tried to call Anne, Clint’s girl in Baltimore, but Anne’s line had been tied up too, and this gave Katharine a clue to what was occurring.

Now Katharine turned on the radio, set water to boiling for coffee and eggs, and tried Hibiscus again. She still couldn’t get through. Official traffic would be heavy, of course, but that wasn’t all. There are usually forty crews for the thirty aircraft of a heavy bomber wing, and seven men to a crew. That meant there were two hundred and eighty families competing with each other, and with government and factory priority calls, to learn whether their sons were still alive. Not only families. The flyers’ girls, like Anne in Baltimore, would be competing also. Katharine wondered what happened to communications in a really big disaster—something bigger than two bombers missing—when the names of the lost were unknown.