Pat Frank - Forbidden Area

After Fischer was gone Lundstrom turned to Cusack. “All right,” he said, “sit down there on the bed and tell me everything you know about your roommate—what’s his name?”

“Smith, sir. Stanley Smith.”

The name clattered into Jesse’s ears. “Colonel,” he said, “did you see that dispatch about the FBI from SAC, the one just in a while ago?”

“Yes,” Lundstrom said. “I saw it. And I’ve been thinking of it for some time. There’s his name, right there, stencilled on the edge of his blanket.”

For the first time Jesse noticed the blanket. It was, he thought, the difference in training. Thereafter, as Cusack talked, he kept silent. Cusack told everything he knew. That was apparent. It was little, but negative intelligence is also useful.

At five o’clock Lieutenant Fischer returned. There were lines of white close to his nose and under his lips, and his face was strained as if he had been running. Yet he was not breathing hard. In his hands he held a bundle wrapped in an oily length of cloth. He placed this cloth on Smith’s bed, and unfolded it. The thermos bottle was there, in pieces, but there was no glass tubing, and the insides did not look at all as a thermos should look. Among the pieces was a small bellows, a tiny box, two tiny batteries, and a solid cylinder that looked like a roll of Boston brown bread, before baking. “There it is,” said Fischer, touching the cylinder with his fingertip. “About the same explosive power as a one-fifty-five howitzer shell. Maybe a little more.”

Lundstrom said, “We’ll go back to administration. This is going to take a little planning. We’ve got to rig a little plant. I want to nail him in the act. Kuhn can give us his kitchen layout and S.O.P. Jess, you’ll handle communications and the alert, right? Do it in Conklin’s name, or mine, if you want. I’ll take the responsibility.”

“Right,” Jesse said. “Let’s get back. I’ve got a lot of work to do.”

In the staff car, Fischer had to ask Jesse a question. “Don’t you want to see us take him?”

“I certainly do,” Jesse said. “Nothing I’d like better. But I won’t have time. This isn’t the only base in the Air Force.”

“I’d forgotten,” Fischer said. He now knew the difference between a very senior staff major and a very junior lieutenant. 5

By the time Jesse Price was back at his desk he had in his mind a partial priority of calls to make and messages to send, and what subsequent action to take and recommend later. He was aware that the list would expand as the situation developed.

He first called Buddy Conklin and told him, quickly, that something big was happening, and to get down to the office right away. This was all he dared say, through a switchboard. It was not impossible that Smith had an accomplice on the base, perhaps in communications, perhaps in the staff itself. It was now 0505. It might be an hour before Lundstrom made his arrest. He could not risk a leak.

He sat at a typewriter and wrote a message, urgent operational priority, top secret, to SAC headquarters. TO COMMANDING GENERAL FROM COMMANDER HIBISCUS-HAVE DISCOVERED PRESSURE BOMBS IN THERMOS BOTTLES OF TYPE PUT ABOARD STRATEGIC BOMBERS WITH FLIGHT LUNCHES. EXPECT ARREST OF SABOTEUR SHORTLY. SUBMIT THAT ALL BASES BE NOTIFIED TO TAKE PRECAUTIONS.

Captain Challon had heard Price’s end of the conversation with General Conklin, and now Challon stood at his side, expectantly. But Jesse did not instantly act. He rolled the message out of the typewriter and reread it, wondering whether he was justified, for the sake of saving a few seconds or even minutes, in assuming Buddy Conklin’s rank and authority and sending it. He had no precedent for such a crisis. Or had he? What did the co-pilot do when a radical decision, involving the safety of the aircraft, was necessary and the pilot was back in the fuselage using the relief tube? The co-pilot made the decision. The worst thing a man could do was freeze at the controls. “Captain,” Jesse said, handing the message to Challon, “you leg this to the communications center yourself and see that it gets off immediately. And wait there until it’s acknowledged.”

Challon read the message on the way to the door, skipped once, awkwardly, and broke into a run down the corridor.

Jesse knew that wasn’t enough. You always had to allow for human frailty. A teletype operator catching a nap in the dead, unpeopled hours before the dawn; a messenger dawdling between offices, unaware of the importance of the slip of paper he carried; a duty officer away from his desk to answer a call of nature—any of these ordinary events, and others, could steal irretrievable minutes. At his hand was the Red Line phone. This was a direct line, equipped with scrambler, to the switchboard of SAC’s command post in Omaha. There was a Red Line phone in the offices of the commanding officer and his deputy on every continental base of the Strategic Air Command. It was for use only in absolute emergency. Jesse picked up this phone. The SAC operator in Omaha, sounding wide awake, put him through without question to the field at Lake Charles, and then to Corpus Christi. He was committed now. His hands were firm on the controls.

He had been in time. The morning missions from Lake Charles were already rolling on the runways. They would be recalled before or immediately after takeoff. In Texas, the morning missions were not scheduled for another hour.

Jesse then flashed the Red Line operator and asked for the SAC duty officer. He was told that his teletype message had been received and was already being relayed to all bases, overseas as well as on the continent. The SAC duty officer, a major like himself, but obviously a bit rattled, wondered whether he should get the SAC commanding general, a man of explosive temper, out of bed.

“I certainly would,” Jesse advised him, “and right now.”

“I guess I’ll have to,” the other man said, and hung up. He sounded unhappy.

At this moment the light on the intercom flashed and a voice said: “Tower to officer commanding.”

“Major Price,” Jesse said. “Go ahead.”

“Sir, we’ve got a request from a private plane to make an emergency landing.”

“Oh, goddamn!” Jesse said.

It would have to happen now. Unauthorized landings of any kind were forbidden on SAC bases. When it happened, passengers and crew were welcomed by the muzzles of machine guns. It was an axiom of airline pilots that it was better to ditch in the sea than crash land on a SAC runway. Hyperbole, perhaps, but it conveyed the general idea. At any other moment, the security detail on the line knew how to handle a stray aircraft, but Jesse realized that Colonel Lundstrom had other plans for his Air Police on this morning. Jesse flicked the key on the intercom and shouted, “Tell him to go away!”

“I did!” said Tower. “I told him to go on to Tampa or Orlando Municipal. He said he couldn’t. He hasn’t got the altitude.”

“Who’s he?”

“He’s a dual-engined Beech. Some oil company job. Pilot, co-pilot, and four big executives. Been down on the Keys, prospecting. For sailfish, I guess. He’s lost one engine and he’s only got eight hundred feet and he says he’s got to land. He’s coming in over the south end of Runway Three now and he says he wants to make it on this pass.”

Whatever happened, Jesse knew he wasn’t going to let the cripple foul up Lundstrom’s arrangements. There wasn’t going to be any alert, and jeeps racing out, and sirens screaming. He wasn’t going to kill the six men in that cripple but he wasn’t going to make it easy for them either. Later they could bitch to the Secretary of Air, but now he was just going to put them on ice. “Tell them they have permission to land, Tower. Then they’re to brake and get off the runway. They aren’t to approach the line, or the hangars. Nobody’s to leave the plane. Anybody steps out of that aircraft, he’s dead.”