Pat Frank - Forbidden Area

“Yes, and he undoubtedly will remain here. He has been treated for cancer at Memorial Hospital, and told he cannot get well. Now, based on these facts—”

Felix Fromburg spoke. “Just a minute.” Katharine realized that they had all forgotten Fromburg, as usual. Fromburg looked like a younger Harry Truman. He looked like her postman and like one of the guards at the AEC main entrance and like Ed Salinger, her English professor at Sarah Lawrence, and like Mr. Kippel, the patient clerk at Brentano’s on F Street. He looked like everybody.

“Oh, I’m sorry, Felix,” said Simmons. “Didn’t mean to leave you out.”

“I may have a little something,” Felix said. “One of the Tass men in New York is a Party wheel. He flew to Mexico four days ago. His girl, an American, quit her job in a dress shop and went with him. It was quite a good job. She can’t marry him because he’s already married. His wife is still in New York. There has been a quiet exodus of other Russians, not counting those who left with the ambassador’s party. Scandanavian Airlines and BOAC have been doing a very brisk business. All the tickets are one way.”

“What about the people from the satellites?” Raoul asked.

“Oh, they’re still here. For that matter, so are the majority of the Russians. They’re necessary sacrifices. And I doubt that any of the people recalled know what’s up. I can imagine a meeting in Moscow, and somebody checking off the names of those who for one reason or another were considered worth saving. These people were simply ordered home. A few others, like the Tass man in New York, may suspect something is coming and have decided to get out from under, or at least save their families. There were twenty-eight Russian women and children aboard a cruise ship for the Caribbean last week.”

While he listened, Jesse Price’s chair had been tilted back, his pipe pointing at the ceiling. Now his chair cracked to the floor. “I think Christmas Eve,” he said.

“Christmas Eve!” said Simmons. “Why?”

“Because I don’t think anybody can bring himself to get excited about Russia with the holidays coming up. Not in this country, except maybe in this room and a few other rooms. Just as Sunday morning was the right time to hit Pearl Harbor because so many officers and men were ashore or off base, weekending and curing hangovers, so Christmas Eve is the right day to destroy the United States. All the cities will be jammed with shoppers. Everybody in uniform who can get leave will be at home. There’ll be skeleton crews at every command post and duty office and interceptor field and AA rocket emplacement. Key men in government will be scattered all over the map. Every Navy captain will try to have his ship in port, and liberty for his men. That right, Steve?”

Commander Batt smiled. “That has been the custom,” he admitted.

“Who wants to fly long range search on the day before Christmas?” Price continued. “What about the men in the radar huts up on the DEW line? Are they thinking about mail, and families, and girls Christmas Eve, or watching their screen for pips? Which do you think?”

“It’s a horrid conception,” Katharine said.

“Perhaps I’m a horrid man,” said Jesse, “but it fits in with Steve’s estimate of the Baltic flotilla’s cruising time to the Gulf ports. And I’ll bet his thirty missing subs, at this moment, are somewhere up there in the fog and winter storms, heading west and south, about a hundred feet submerged and doing eleven or twelve knots. Think of the confusion if it came Christmas Eve. There wouldn’t be any Christmas Day, only confusion, only chaos and savagery.”

Simmons spoke, very quietly, “This is your true, considered opinion?”

“It is.”

“Good. It is mine also. Is there any dissent, any flaw in the reasoning?”

No one spoke.

Simmons leaned forward. “Would each of you stake your life that this is what’s going to happen?” He paused. “I know you think that a strange question. But if we send along an appendix to our forecast, saying that the attack is coming Christmas Eve—and if we are believed—then many others will stake their reputations, yes, and even their lives, on our judgment. There will be mobilization, alerts, the movement of thousands of aircraft and hundreds of ships, and enormous expense. In such a drastic upheaval casualties will be inevitable. Martial Law will be necessary. In some cities, the news may inspire panic buying or even disorganized exodus. The Stock Market will fall on its face. There may be runs on banks, for people may be moved to withdraw all their cash and buy commodities. If we are wrong, not only will we personally be through, forever, but the careers of all who supported us in the past, and believe in us now, will be finished. The United States will be the laughingstock of the world. It’ll be Orson Welles’ invasion from Mars all over again, but much more serious, multiplied a thousandfold. The Administration will be disgraced, and nobody will ever believe a similar alert in the future.”

Jesse Price knocked out his pipe in a glass ash tray. In the silence it sounded like a hammer. Yet when he spoke he was calm, even smiling, for he had made his decision. “I don’t mind laying my life on the line for a sufficient reason, and I consider this sufficient. In my heart I know we are right.”

“We would be taking an awful chance, though, now wouldn’t we?” Raoul said.

Katharine looked across the table at him. Raoul, she realized, was essentially conservative. Simmons had called for unanimity, and she felt impelled to back him up. “Jess is right, Raoul,” she said. “It is like mathematics. There can only be one correct answer to an equation, and this is it. Oh, I know we take a chance, pinpointing the day. But we need shock effect. If the forecast is to be useful, it must be distributed and read—now.”

“It used to be that you could get anything read around here,” Batt said, “by stamping it top secret, or ‘eyes only.’ Now everything is top secret and it doesn’t attract attention.”

The single door to the conference room was flung open, and General Clumb entered, rumbling in his throat like the exhaust of a medium tank. His cropped gray head was down and his wide shoulders held low, as if he expected to tackle someone. His face, rigid and cragged like rough terrain, was scarlet. In his right hand, rolled up as if for swatting flies, and encased in the red plastic jacket that indicated top secret documents, was a sheaf of paper. Katharine knew it was FORECAST OF RUSSIAN MILITARY ACTION, Copy No. 1. 4

General Clumb had been assigned to the Pentagon, duty which he detested, two years before his date for retirement. Clumb was a field general, and more specifically a general of cavalry, or, as it is now called, armor. As commander of one of Patton’s regimental combat teams, he achieved the summit of his fame in the sweep across France. He was photographed, just before the liberation of Metz, standing in the turret of a point tank, tommy gun under his left arm, his powerful right hand flourishing an 1870 sabre he had discovered in a French farmhouse. It was a dramatic photograph, seeming to symbolize the union of Custer with a helmeted Superman, widely published, and perhaps responsible for his first star. Clumb remembered World War II with nostalgia and preferred not to think of wars tanks couldn’t win. Oh, he believed that nuclear weapons would work, all right (although not against armor properly dispersed), but he pretended to ignore their existence, in staff discussions, as a gentleman avoids mention of social diseases in mixed company. If pressed, he announced that neither side would use bombs, A or H. “Just like poison gas in the second World War,” he always said. “Both sides had gas but neither used it.”