Pat Frank - Forbidden Area

“Certainly I mean it. We may be able to ride out this thing in Front Royal.”

Katharine sat up straight and looked at him, and he looked different, and she knew he would never look the same to her again. “You’re a fool,” she said. “You can die in Front Royal, too. A little slower, perhaps, but you’ll die. If the wind is from the northeast you’ll be blanketed by fallout from Washington or Baltimore or both. If it’s from the northwest you’ll catch it from Pittsburgh. The wind doesn’t blow that won’t kill you.”

“You’re wrong,” Raoul said. “I’ve thought of everything. There’s a deep cellar under the lodge. My father used it for hanging game and storing wine and cheeses and vegetables. An old-fashioned cold room. It’ll be adequate protection against radiation, particularly if we spread a layer of earth between tarps on the floor overhead. And everything we need, we’ll have. Stayed up last night typing a list.” From his inside coat pocket he brought out folded pages. “Let’s check it over.”

“I’d rather not,” she said.

He examined his list with satisfaction. “Canned goods enough to last a year. Went by a wholesale grocery house this morning. A truckload of stuff is on the way now. Whisky, cigarettes, medical supplies, knives, axes, candles, ammunition, fishing tackle, even mousetraps. When we get up there Friday, first thing I’ll do will be buy a side of beef and load up the freezer with meat.”

She laughed at him. “How long do you think you’ll have electricity in Front Royal—or any other small town for that matter? Who’s going to worry about hauling coal so Front Royal will have its electricity? And I suppose your lodge has an electric kitchen, hasn’t it? Hard to cook on an electric stove without current.”

“Katy, you underestimate me. We have our own generator. Rural light systems are always uncertain. Another thing I’m going to do, Friday, is get the garage filled with drums of gasoline.”

“You certainly have thought of everything, haven’t you?”

“Oh, yes,” he said. “Now most people would forget finances. But once New York is gone, the whole financial system of the country will crumble. Bonds, stocks, insurance policies, bank accounts—all useless. There’ll be a general moratorium on debts, and only cash will be worth anything. So this morning I converted a hundred thousand in governments into cash. I have it right here.” He tapped his dispatch case.

She shook her head. “Wrong, Raoul, dollars won’t be worth their weight in canned beans.”

“Beans or dollars,” he said, “we’ll have ’em both.”

Katharine got up from the couch and started to pace, as she always did when angry or excited. “One thing you haven’t thought of—people.”

“What do you mean, people?”

“The people around Front Royal aren’t going to like you very much, Raoul. You’ll have everything and they’ll have nothing. They aren’t going to like you at all, and maybe they’ll start spreading the wealth, beans or dollars or whatever you’ve got. Then there’ll be other people—city people like me—who will escape the blast and fire and swarm out over the countryside. They’ll be hungry. They’ll want part of that side of beef.”

Raoul’s mouth set, and she saw how thin, like a skate’s, his mouth could be, and how flinty his eyes. He said, “They put a foot on my property and I’ll shoot ’em down like rabbits!”

“Will you, now?”

“Yes, I will. We owe it to ourselves to stay alive. We’re the ones who have a right to live. I’m not a snob, social or intellectual. It’s just an old law—survival of the fittest.”

“Not we,” she said. “Only you.”

Raoul looked up, startled, and slipped the list back into his pocket. “Katy, this isn’t the time for you to try to be a heroine. Think it over. I still have an awful lot of things to buy. I’ll be back tomorrow. At one, say? Lunch at the Mayflower?”

She said, quietly, “When you come back, tomorrow or any time, I won’t be in.”

After he was gone she felt nauseated, as if she had picked a firm, ripe fruit from a ribboned basket, and bitten into worms. 5

At ten o’clock that morning a B-99 had taken off from a SAC base near Corpus Christi, Texas, on an interesting mission. In its belly was a concrete replica, in weight and size, of a twenty-megaton H-bomb. Its flight plan called for it to fly out over the Gulf for fifteen minutes, at low altitude, turn 180 degrees, and then arrow back to shore. It would pass inland between Galveston and Sabine Pass at an altitude of less than a thousand feet, and maximum speed. It would stay on the deck for another hundred miles, then climb to 55,000 feet, and fly on a plotted zigzag course to Kansas City. It would simulate the bombing of Kansas City from 65,000. The mission, in type of terrain to be crossed, speed and altitudes maintained, and duration, approximated a flight from a SAC base in Turkey across the Black Sea to the Russian coast between Tuapse and Sochi, then on to Gorki on the Volga. It was a very practical mission. The B-99 was to attempt to sneak in from the Gulf at less than a thousand feet to avoid the eyes of coastal radar, which is subject to blindness when a plane hides behind the curvature of the earth. It was primarily a test of fuel consumption and speed at this inefficient low altitude, and of Texas radar defenses as well.

Operations at Corpus Christi was in touch with this plane on its flight out over the Gulf, and radar picked it up as it made its turn for the dash back to the coast. Radar lost it before it raced over the shore line at 600 knots, its afterburners flaming, but Corpus Christi, of course, kept in touch with the aircraft commander. Over Lufkin, Texas, the B-99 began to climb, as if Russian coastal defenses had been evaded, and the danger now was interceptors. Thirteen minutes later the pilot’s voice, recorded on tape at Corpus Christi, said, “This is Georgia Peach . . . am approaching Red River at Angels two five . . . repeat two five . . . two five thousand feet . . . speed . . .”

They never learned what his speed was, because that was the last message Georgia Peach sent.

In a few minutes, at Corpus Christi, at Fort Worth, and the other big fields in Texas, they knew they had another. They had a vanishing jet bomber like the three from Hibiscus and the one from Lake Charles.

But this one was not quite the same.

It was over land, not water. It was witnessed. And there was a human survivor, although the B-99 itself was shredded into bits of metal that fell like silvery rain over a five-mile area not far from Texarkana. Except for the eight engines. They came down like smoking meteors.

This B-99 was making a contrail, a clean white chalk line across the pale blue blackboard of the winter sky, so that many eyes were turned up to it, and saw it happen. Most of them agreed that they saw a red flash and then an explosion. Or perhaps it was two explosions, a small one and a big one later. The witnesses spoke of a ball of orange fire and a black cloud where there had been no cloud before, but, being eyewitnesses, none of their stories were exactly alike. Some told exactly what they saw, but most related what they thought they should have seen, or allowed their memory to be influenced by the tales of others.

All agreed that out of the cloud a number of specks fell. When it was five or ten thousand feet above the ground—the guesses of the witnesses naturally differed—one of these specks changed shape. A filmy white parachute mushroomed above it, and, swinging gently, it floated to earth. The survivor, Master Sergeant George Lear, radarman, fell within five hundred yards of the 3-X ranchhouse and received immediate first aid. Both eyes were blackened, his scalp lacerated, his hands and face burned, his body bruised, and he was stunned and suffering from shock. But he was alive, and by the time the rescue helicopters and intelligence teams arrived on the scene he was able to talk.