Harry Frank - Alas, Babylon

The Hazzards first had planted a grove. A few years later they built a comfortable six-room rambler and started landscaping the grounds. Thereafter they lived in the house one month each year, when Sam took his annual leave, trying it and wearing it until it fitted perfectly.

On his sixty-second birthday Sam Hazzard retired, to the relief of a number of his fellow admirals. There were rivalries within, as well as between, the armed services. In the Navy, the rivalry had once been between the battleship and carrier admirals. When it became a rivalry between atomic subs and super-carriers, Hazzard had outspokenly favored the submarines. Since he once had commanded a carrier task force, and never had been a submariner, the carrier admirals regarded his stand as just short of treason. Worse, for years he had claimed that Russia’s most dangerous threat was the terrible combination of submarines equipped with missiles armed with nuclear warheads. Such a theory, if unchallenged, would force the Navy to spend a greater part of its energy and money on anti-submarine warfare. Since this, per se, was defense, and since the Navy’s whole tradition was to take the offensive, Hazzard spent his final years of duty conning a desk.

Two days after his retirement his wife died, so she never really lived in the house on the Timucuan, and she never physically shared his second life. Yet often she seemed close, when he trimmed a shrub she had planted, or when in the evenings he sat alone on the patio, and reached to touch the arm of the chair at his side.

The Admiral discovered there were not enough hours in the day to do all the things that were necessary, and that he wanted to do. There was the citrus, the grounds, experiments with exotic varieties of bananas and papaya, discreet essays to be written for the United States Naval Institute Proceedings and not-so-discreet articles for magazines of general circulation. Sam Hazzard found that the Henrys were extraordinarily convenient neighbors. Malachai tended the grounds and helped design and build the dock. Two-Tone, when in the mood—broke and sober—worked in the grove. The Henry women cleaned, and did his laundry. Preacher Henry was the Admiral’s private fishing guide, which meant that the Admiral consistently caught more and bigger bass than anyone on the Timucuan, and possibly in all of Central Florida.

But Sam Hazzard’s principal hobby was listening to shortwave radio. He was not a ham operator. He had no transmitter. He listened. He did not chatter. He monitored the military frequencies and the foreign broadcasts and, with his enormous background of military and political knowledge, he kept pace with the world outside Fort Repose. Sometimes, perhaps, he was a bit ahead of everyone.

It was ten to eleven when Randy knocked on Admiral Hazzard’s door. It opened immediately. The Admiral was a taut, neatly made man who had weighed 133 when he boxed for the Academy and who weighted 133 now. He was dressed in a white turtleneck sweater, flannels, and boat shoes. A halo of cottony hair encircled his sunburned bald spot. Otherwise, he was not saintly. His nose has been flattened in some long-forgotten brawl in Port Said or Marseilles. His gray eyes, canopied by heavy white brows, were red-rimmed, and angry. For the Admiral, this had been a day of frustration, helplessness, and hatred—hatred for the unimaginative, purblind, selfish fools who had not believed him, and frustration because on this day of supreme danger and need, his lifetime of training and experience was not and could not be put to use. The Admiral said, “I saw your headlights coming down the road. Come in.” He squinted at Helen.

“My sister-in-law, Helen Bragg,” Randy said.

“An evil day to receive a beautiful woman,” The Admiral said, his voice surprisingly mild and mannered to issue from such a pugnacious face. “Come on in to my Combat Plot, and listen to the war, if such a massacre can be called a war.”

He led them to his den. A heavily planked workbench ran along the wall under the windows overlooking the river. On this bench was a large, black, professional-looking shortwave receiver, a steaming coffee-maker, notebooks and pencils. The radio screeched with power, static, interference, and occasional words in the almost unintelligible language of conflict.

On two other walls, cork-covered, were pinned maps—the polar projection and the Eurasian land mass on one wall, a military map of the United States on the other.

A hoarse voice broke through the static: “This is Adelaide Six-Five-One. I am sitting on a skunk at Alpha Romeo Poppa Four. Skunk at Alpha Romeo Poppa Four.”

A different voice replied immediately: “Adelaide Six-Five-One, this is Adelaide. Hold one.”

There was silence for a moment, and then the second voice continued: “Adelaide Six-Five-One-Adelaide. Have relayed your message to Hector. He is busy but will be free in ten to fifteen minutes. Squat on that skunk and wait for Hector.”

“Adelaide from Adelaide Six-Five-One. Charley.”

Helen sat down. For the first time that day, she was showing fatigue. The Admiral said, “Coffee?”

“I’d love a cup,” she said.

Randy said, “Sam, what was that on the radio? Part of the war?”

The Admiral poured coffee before he replied. “A big part of it, for us. Right now I’m tuned to a Navy and Air Force ASW frequency in the five megacycle band.”

“ASW?”

“Anti-submarine warfare. I’ll interpret. A Navy super Connie with a saucer radome has located a skunk—an enemy submarine—at coordinates Alpha Romeo Poppa Four. I happen to know that’s about three hundred miles off Norfolk. The radar picket has called home base—Adelaide—and Adelaide is sending Hector to knock off the skunk. Hector is one of our killer subs. But Hector is presently engaged. When he is free, he will communicate directly with Adelaide Six-Five-One. The plane will give Hector a course and when he is in range Hector will cut loose with a homing torpedo and that will be the end of the skunk. We hope.”

“Who’s winning?” Randy asked, aware that it was a ridiculous question.

“Who’s winning? Nobody’s winning. Cities are dying and ships are sinking and aircraft is going in, but nobody’s winning.”

Helen asked the question she had come to ask. “Did you hear Mrs. Vanbruuker-Brown on the radio a while ago?”

“Yes.”

“Where do you think she was speaking from?”

The Admiral walked across the room and looked at the map of the United States. It was covered with acetate overlay and ten or twelve cities were ringed with red-crayon goose eggs, in the way that a unit position is marked on an infantry map. The Admiral scratched the white stubble on his chin and said, “I think Denver. Hunneker, the three-star she named Chief of Staff, was Army representative on NORAD, in Colorado Springs. Chances are that he was in Denver this morning, or she was in Colorado Springs, when the word came through that Washington had been atomized.”

Helen set down her coffee cup. Her fingers trembled. “You’re sure that she couldn’t have been in Omaha?”

“Omaha!” said the Admiral. “That’s the last place she’d be speaking from! You notice that whenever I’ve heard a broadcast, of any kind, that allowed me to identify a city, I ringed it on the map. I’ve heard no amateurs talking from Omaha, and I haven’t heard SAC since the attack. Ordinarily, I can pick up SAC right away. They’re always talking on their single side band transmitters to bases out of the country. Their call sign was ‘Big Fence.’ I haven’t heard ‘Big Fence’ all day on any frequency. And the enemy hates and fears SAC, more, even, than they fear the Navy, I’ll admit. Scratch Omaha.”

Sam Hazzard noticed the effect of his words on Helen’s expression; he recalled that Randy’s brother, her husband, was an Air Force colonel, and he sensed that he had been tactless. “Your husband isn’t in Omaha, is he, Mrs. Bragg?”