Randy looked at Helen, inquiringly. She said, “It’s all right. Both of them know all about it. I didn’t realize it until we were on the plane. Children are precocious these days, aren’t they? They learn the facts of life before you have a chance to explain anything.”
While they waited for the luggage, Randy spoke of the news.
They listened gravely. Ben Franklin alone commented. “Sounds like the kickoff. I guess Dad knew what he was doing.” Nothing more was said about it for a time.
Randy felt relieved when the suburbs of Orlando were behind them and, with traffic thin at this hour, he was holding to a steady seventy. He thought his apprehension illogical. Why should he be upset by the remark of a thirteen-year-old boy? When he was sure the children slept in the back seat, he said, “They take it calmly, almost as a matter of course, don’t they?”
“Yes,” Helen said. “You see, all their lives, ever since they’ve known anything, they’ve lived under the shadow of war-atomic war. For them the abnormal has become normal. All their lives they have heard nothing else, and they expect it.”
`They’re conditioned,” Randy said. “A child of the nineteenth century would quickly go mad with fear, I think, in the world of today. It must have been pretty wonderful to have lived in the years, say, between 1870 and 1914, when peace was the normal condition and people really were appalled at the idea of war, and believed there’d never be a big one. A big one was impossible, they used to say. It would cost too much. It would disrupt world trade and bankrupt everybody. Even after the First World War people didn’t accept war as normal. They had to call it The War to End War or we wouldn’t have fought it. Helen, what has become of us?”
Helen, busy tuning the car radio, trying to bring in fresh news, said, “You’re a bit of an idealist, aren’t you, Randy?”
“I suppose so. It’s been an expensive luxury. Maybe one day I’ll get conditioned. I’ll accept things, like the children.”
Helen said, “Listen!” She had brought in a Miami station, and the announcer was saying the station was remaining on the air through the night to give news of the new crisis.
“Now we have a bulletin from Washington,” he said: “The Navy Department has finally released a full statement on the Latakia incident. Early today a Navy carrier-based fighter fired a single air-to-air rocket at an unidentified jet plane which had been shadowing units of the Sixth Fleet. This rocket exploded in the harbor area of Latakia. The Navy calls it a regrettable mechanical error. It is possible that this rocket struck an ammunition train and started a chain explosion, the statement admits. The Navy categorically denies any deliberate bombardment. We will bring you further bulletins as they are received.”
The Miami station began to broadcast a medley of second World War patriotic songs which Randy remembered from boyhood. One was “Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition.” It sounded tinny and in poor taste, but Miami’s entertainment was usually in poor taste.
Randy said, “Do you believe it? Is it possible?”
Helen didn’t answer. She was staring straight ahead, as if hypnotized by the headlights’ beam, and her lips were moving. He realized that her mind was far away. She had not heard him.
Randy had them all in their rooms, and asleep, by five-thirty. He had carried all their luggage, eleven bags, upstairs.
He went to his own apartment and collapsed on the studio couch in the living room. Graf jumped up and snuggled under his arm. Almost at once, without bothering to loosen his belt or remove his shoes, Randy slept.
It was 0500 at Offutt Field, with dawn still more than two hours distant, when General Hawker, unbidden, returned to the Hole. The General followed in the tradition of Vandenberg, Norstad, and LeMay. He had received his fourth star while still in his forties, and now, at fifty, considered it part of his job that he remain slim and in excellent physical condition. Once warfare, except among the untutored savages, had been fought during the daylight hours. This had changed during the twentieth century until now rockets and aircraft recognized neither darkness nor bad weather, and were handicapped neither by oceans nor mountains nor distance. Now, the critical factor in warfare was time, measured in minutes or seconds. Hawker had adjusted his life to this condition. In the past week he had not slept more than four hours at a stretch. He had trained himself to catnap in his office for tenor twenty-minute periods, after which he felt remarkably refreshed.
The engineers who designed the Hole had arranged that the Commander in Chief’s Command Post be on a glass-enclosed balcony, from which he could see all the War Room maps, and all the activity on the floor below, and be surrounded by his staff In this moment it wasn’t operating like that at all. Hawker had his feet up on the desk in the Control Room. He was drinking black coffee from a green dimestore mug, and rapidly reading through a stack of the more important operational and intelligence dispatches. Occasionally, the General fired a question at one or the other of his two colonels, Atkins and Bragg.
An A-2 staff sergeant came into the room with two pink flimsies and handed them to Mark Bragg. The General looked up, inquiringly.
Mark said, “From the Eastern Sea Frontier. Patrol planes on the Argentina-Bermuda axis report three unidentified contacts. These skunks are headed for the Atlantic coast.”
“Sounds bad, doesn’t it?”
“I think this one sounds worse,” Mark said. “All news service and diplomatic communications between Moscow and the United States have been inoperative for the last hour. This comes from USIA. The news agencies have been calling their Moscow correspondents. All the Moscow operators will say is, `Sorry. I am unable to complete the call.’ “
“And there’s been no reaction to Latakia from Moscow at “None, sir. Not a whisper.”
The General shook his head, slowly, frowning, lines appearing and deepening around mouth and eyes, his whole face undergoing a transformation, growing older, as if in a few seconds all the strain and fatigue of weeks, months, years had accumulated and were marking his face and bowing his shoulders. the strain and fatigue of weeks, months, years had accumulated and were marking his face and bowing his shoulders.
Hawker said, “This is the witching hour, you know. This is the bad one. Their submarines have had a whole night to run in on the coast if that’s what they’re doing. We’re in darkness. They’ll soon be in daylight. Dawn is the bad time. What time does it start to get light in New York and Washington?” “Sunrise on the seaboard is Seven-ten Eastern Standard,” Ace Atkins said. Washington’s clock read 6:41.
Mark Braggs mind raced ahead, If an attack came, they could count on no more than fifteen minutes’ warning. If they used every one of those minutes with maximum efficiency, retaliation could be decisive. But Mark feared a minute, or even two, might be lost in necessary communication with Washington. He made a bold proposal. “May I suggest, sir, that we ask for the release of our weapons?”
This was the one mandatory, essential act that must precede the terrible decision to use the weapons. Under the law, the President of the United States “owned” the nuclear bombs and missile warheads. General Hawker was entrusted with their custody only. Before SAC could use the weapons, the permission of the President~r his survivor in a line of succession-must be secured. If an attack were underway, that permission would come almost, but not quite, instantly.
The General seemed a little startled. “Don’t you think we can wait, Mark?”
“Yes, sir, we can wait, but if we get it out of the way, it couLd save us a minute, maybe two. The danger, and the necessity of not having a communications’ snafu, must be just as apparent in the Pentagon, or the White House, or wherever the President is, as it is here.”