Alas, Babylon Read online

  At eleven P.M., Omaha time, while the Damascus broadcast was being repeated around the world, Mark was in the children’s rooms, feeling like an intruder. It was the silence that discomforted him. He found himself tiptoeing, listening for the missing sounds. The house was still as northern woods in winter, when all the creatures are gone.

  Ben Franklin’s room looked as if it had been ransacked by a band of monkeys rather than that a thirteen-year-old boy had packed. Mark closed dresser drawers and picked up ties, clothes-hangers, and shoes and socks, never in pairs. He supposed all boys were like that. Peyton’s room looked no different than if this had been an ordinary day, as if she had been invited to a slumber party at the home of a friend and would return in the morning. Her bedspread was uncreased, and the furry toy animal that held her pajamas rested precisely in its center, as always. She had forgotten it. Her doll collection, carefully propped up on a tier of shelves, formed a silent audience to his silent inspection. Peyton hadn’t asked to take her dolls to Florida. Perhaps she was outgrowing dolls. Or perhaps she didn’t realize; when she left them, that it might be forever. Her desk was neat, pencils aligned as if at squads right, schoolbooks stacked in a pyramid. He picked up the books and took them downstairs. He would mail them from Offutt in the morning, after he was off duty. Peyton was a tidy and thoughtful little girl, in looks and temperament much like her mother. He loved her. He loved them both. They had been very satisfactory children. The house was intolerably quiet. In the whole house the only sound was the ticking of clocks.

  Driving toward Offutt, and his job, Mark felt better. When he turned into the four-lane highway that ran south to the base he saw that it was eleven-thirty and flipped on the car radio. It was then that he heard the Arab charge that Latakia had been bombed by American planes and, in addition, a rather strange statement from Washington. “A Navy Department spokesman,” the newscaster said, “denies that there has been any intentional attack on the Syrian coast.”

  Mark stepped down on the accelerator and watched the speedometer needle pass seventy-five. On a turn the back wheels weaved. Ice. He forced himself to concentrate on his driving. Soon he would know everything that was known in the Hole, which meant everything that was known to American Intelligence, and the world-wide news networks, everywhere. Meanwhile it was pointless to guess, or end up in a ditch, a useless casualty with no Purple Heart.

  Twelve minutes later Mark entered the War Room, fifty feet underground. Blinking in the brilliant but shadowless artificial sunlight, he glanced at the map panels. Nothing startling. He walked on to the offices of A-2, Intelligence. In the inner office Dutch Klein, Deputy A-2 and a buck general in his early forties, waited for his relief. An electric coffee maker steamed on Dutch’s desk. Two ashtrays were filled with crushed cigarette butts. Dutch had been busy. Dutch said, “I guess you’ve heard the news.”

  “I caught it on the radio. It’s not true, is it?”

  “It’s fantastic!” Dutch touched a sheaf of pink flimsies, decoded priority messages, on his desk. “Two hours ago Sixth Fleet scrambled fighters to intercept a jet snooper. An ensign from Saratoga—an ensign, mind you—sighted the bogy and chased him all the way up the Levant. He closed at Latakia and fired a bird. Whether it was human error or an erratic rocket isn’t clear. Anyway, everything blew.” Dutch, a muscular, keg-shaped man with round, rubbery face, groaned and sank back into his chair.

  Automatically the fortifications of the port area of Latakia came into focus in Mark’s mind. “Large stores of conventional mines, torpedoes, and ammo,” he said. “They usually have four to eight subs in the new pens and a couple of cruisers and escort vessels in the harbor.” He hesitated, thinking of something else, worse. “The fire and blast could have cooked off nuclear weapons, if they were in combat configuration. That could well be. What do you make of it?”

  “Worst foul-up on record,” Dutch said. “Glad it’s the Navy and not us.”

  “I mean, how do you think the Russians will react?” Mark asked the question not because he thought Dutch could give him the answer, but as a catalyst to his own imagination. Intelligence wasn’t Dutch’s primary interest. On the way up to two stars and command of an air division, Dutch had been forced to assimilate two years of staff, part of his education. To Mark, the Intelligence job, with all its political and psychological facets, was a career in itself. He had a feel for it, the capacity to stir a headful of unrelated facts until they congealed into a pattern arrowing the future. Dutch said, “Maybe it’ll throw them off balance.”

  “It might upset their timetable,” Mark agreed, “but I’m afraid they’re all set. It might just give the Kremlin a casus belli, an excuse.”

  Dutch lifted himself out of the chair. “I leave it with you. The C in C was here until a few minutes ago. He said he had to get some sleep because it might get even hairier tomorrow. If there are any important political developments you’re to call him. Operations will handle the alert status, as usual.”

  For thirty minutes Mark concentrated on the pile of flimsies, the latest intelligence from NATO, Smyrna, Naples, the Philippines, Eastern Sea Frontier, and the summaries from Air Defense Command and the CIA. When he was abreast of the situation he crossed the War Room to Operations Control.

  The Senior Controller on duty was Ace Atkins, a former fighter pilot, like Mark an eagle colonel. He was called Ace because he had been one, in two wars. Because of proven courage and absolute coolness, he was at the desk now occupied, with the red phone a few inches from his fingers. One code word into Ace’s red phone would cock SAC’s two thousand bombers and start the countdown at the missile sites. It would take another word, either spoken by General Hawker or with his authority, to launch the force.

  Ace, slight and wiry, looked up and said, “Welcome to Bedlam!” The Control Room, separated from the War Room by heavy glass, was utterly quiet.

  Mark said, “I’m worried. I wish Washington would come forth with a complete statement. As things stand now, most of the world will believe we attacked Latakia deliberately.”

  “Why don’t the Navy information people give out?”

  “They want to. They’ve got a release ready. But they’re low echelon and you know Washington.”

  “Not very well.”

  “I know it well,” Mark said, “and I think I can pretty well guess what’s happening. Everybody wants to put his chop on it because it’s so important but for the same reason nobody wants to take the responsibility. The Navy PIO probably called an Assistant Secretary, and the Assistant Secretary called the Secretary and the Secretary probably called the Secretary of Defense. By that time: the Information Agency and State Department were involved. By now more and more people are getting up and they are calling more and more people.” Mark looked at the clocks, above the War Room maps, telling the time in all zones from Omsk to Guam. “It’s two A.M. in Washington now. As each man gives his okay to the release it turns out that somebody else has to be consulted. Eventually they’ll have the Secretary of State out of bed and then the White House press secretary. Maybe he’ll wake up the President. Until that happens, I don’t think there’ll be any full statement.”

  Ace said. “My God! That sounds awful.”

  “It is, but what worries me most is Moscow.”

  “What’s Moscow saying?”

  “Not a word. Not a whisper. Usually Radio Moscow would be screaming bloody murder. That’s what worries me. As long as people keep talking they’re not fighting. When Moscow quits talking, I’m afraid they’re acting.” Mark borrowed a cigarette and lit it. “I think the chances are about sixty-forty,” he said, “that they’ve started their countdown.”

  Ace’s fingers stroked the red phone. “Well,” he said, “we’re as ready as we ever will be. Fourteen percent of the force is airborne now and another seventeen percent on standby. I’m prepared to hold that ratio until we’re relieved at 0800. How’s that sound to you, Mark?”

  As always, the responsibility to act lay with A
-3. Mark Bragg, as A-2, could only advise. He said, “That’s a pretty big effort. You can’t keep the whole force in the air and on standby all the time. I know that, and yet—” He stretched. “I’ll trot back to my cave and see what else comes in. I’ll check with you in an hour.”

  On his desk, Mark found copies of three more urgent dispatches. One, from the Air attach, in Ankara, reported Russian aerial reconnaissance over the Azerbaijan frontier. Another, from the Navy Department, gave a submarine-sighting two hundred miles off Seattle, definitely a skunk. The third, received by the State Department from London in the highest secret classification, said Downing Street had authorized the RAF to arm intermediate range missiles, including the Thor, with nuclear warheads.

  In an hour Helen’s plane would touch down in Orlando. In two hours, if the plane was on time, Helen and the children would be in an area of comparative safety. Mark prayed that for the next two hours, at least, nothing more would happen. He held fast to the thought, so long as there was no war, there was always a chance for peace. As the minutes and hours eroded away, and no word came from Moscow, he became more and more certain that a massive strike had been ordered. He diagnosed this negative intelligence as more ominous than almost anything that could have happened, and determined to awaken General Hawker if it persisted.

  At three-thirty in the morning Randolph Bragg waited in Orlando’s air terminal for Helen’s flight. With only a few night coaches scheduled in from New York, plus the non-stop from Chicago, the building was almost empty except for sweepers and scrubwomen. When he saw a plane’s landing lights, Randy walked outside to the gate. On the other side of the field, near the military hangars used by Air-Sea Rescue Command, he saw the silhouettes of six B-47s, part of the wing from McCoy, he deduced, using this field in accordance with a dispersal plan. The military hangars and Operations building were bright with light, which at this hour was not usual.

  The big transport came in for its landing, approached on the taxi strip, pivoted to a halt before him, and cut its engines. He saw that only a few people were getting off. Most would be going on to Miami. He saw Peyton and Ben Franklin come down the steps, Ben incongruously wearing an overcoat, Peyton carrying a bow, a quiver of arrows over her shoulder. Then he saw Helen and she waved and he ran out to meet them.

  Randy rumpled Ben Franklin’s hair. The children were both owl-eyed and tired. He leaned over, kissed Peyton, and relieved her of the bow slung over her shoulder. Helen said, “She’s been watching Robin Hood. She thinks she’s Maid Marian.”

  Helen was wearing a long cashmere coat and carrying a fur cape over her arm. She appeared fresh, as if starting rather than completing a journey. She was slight—Mark sometimes referred to her as “my pocket Venus”—yet Randy was never aware of that except when he saw her completely relaxed. At all other times her body seemed to obey the physical law that kinetic energy increases mass. Her abundant vitality she somehow communicated to others, so that when Helen was present everyone’s blood flowed a little faster, as Randy’s did now. She tiptoed to kiss him and said, “I feel like ten kinds of a fool, Randy.”

  He said, “Don’t be silly.”

  They walked toward the terminal. She presented him with a sheaf of baggage checks. “Mark made me take everything. We’re going to be an awful nuisance. Also, I feel like a coward.”

  “You won’t when you hear what’s just happened in the Med.”

  Ben Franklin turned, suddenly awake, and said, “What happened in the Med, Randy?”

  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 Chie
f’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?”

  “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.

  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.