Command Decision Read online

  The sergeant burst into a triumphant chuckle. Brockhurst waited patiently for it to subside.

  “I got out,” he said. “And I’ve got a new pass from General Kane. The guardhouse was a break for me. But I still want to know what became of the German Dennis had in there.”

  “What are the other angles?”

  “Why has Dennis been to London so often lately?”

  Evans yawned. “Why does anyone go to London?”

  “Not that Puritanical bastard,” said Brockhurst. “Then yesterday, without even alerting us, Dennis runs off the longest mission of the war and has the worst losses to date. We try to help you guys take the curse off it with a good story and you won’t even give us the target. ‘Industrial Objectives!’ That’s a fine comfort to a lot of new widows back home.”

  “Go on.”

  “This morning everything that could roll to the end of the runway went earlier and they aren’t back yet. Maximum effort, deep in Germany, two days straight. For what?”

  “Why don’t you ask some smart newspaperman?”

  Frustration made Brockhurst’s voice edgy. “Those jerks are still waiting permission to go to bases. They think this is just a routine mission.”

  “What makes you think it isn’t?”

  “Because I get paid for using my head instead of Public Relations handouts.” He let this sink in and then barked, “Why has Dennis got a squadron commander with a D.F.C. under close arrest right now in the same guardhouse where they had me?”

  “Not brushing his teeth?”

  “Okay, my helpful friend, I’ll tell you. He’s there for refusing to go on this hush-hush mission this morning.”

  Evans jaw muscles tightened now. “Did he tell you that?”

  “Rafferty won’t let me talk to him. And I suppose Dennis will back him up. But if that little tin-star tyrant thinks the American press will stand for this…”

  “By God, you might be worth a Legion of Merit,” said Evans and shifted his glance pointedly to the Tommy guns.

  Brockhurst snorted. “You won’t get it from Dennis. Cliff Garnett sat down at Prestwick last night by special plane.”

  “Who’s he?”

  “You never heard of Brigadier General Clifton C. Garnett, Secretary to the United Chiefs of Staff?”

  “Oh God! Now we’ll never get the war over,” said Evans.

  “I’ll bet you Dennis’s war is over in a week.”

  “You reckon they’d trade him for one of them Pentagon bellhops?”

  “Garnett should have had this job to begin with.”

  Evans had heard of generals being fired but there was something about all this that didn’t quite fit. Remembering, he shook his head firmly.

  “They can’t. They never fired no general yet till they give him the Legion of Merit, or if it was bad enough the D.S.M. Dennis, he hasn’t got neither.”

  “They can give ’em mighty quick. Going to miss your hero?”

  “He’s no hero to me. I just taken this job in with the big wheels to chisel myself a ticket to China now I’m done with this war. Does this Garnett drink whiskey or Scotch?”

  Brockhurst leaned forward gravely, confidentially.

  “Listen, Sarge, Dennis is washed up. Trouble with the press, record losses yesterday and probably again today, a hero in the guardhouse; he’s a ruptured duck, boy. But a couple of angles on this deal would be worth some good bourbon to me.”

  “What angles?”

  “What became of that German Dennis had in the guardhouse?”

  “Bonded bourbon?”

  “Bottled in bond.”

  “How much?”

  “Four bottles.”

  Evans face darkened with indignation. “You give Rafferty in the guardhouse two cases, just for having his girl in the village make that phone call that got you out.”

  “I did like hell. I gave Peterson one case…” Brockhurst shut his mouth, too late. He had set too many verbal traps himself not to feel the click of this one. “Okay, call it a case—for the whole story, though.”

  Evans looked cautiously at both doors, removed the cigar from his mouth, and leaned forward. Brockhurst’s ears stretched.

  “Dennis kept him there till last night. But yesterday they was a snafu at the Quartermaster’s and he run clean out of Spam. The General he said by God he’d promised the men meat for breakfast and if they wasn’t no other meat we’d just have to use that Kraut. If you could have heard them boys at breakfast bitching about the meat packers’ profiteering….”

  Brockhurst arose, livid. “Okay, you got your joke and I still got my whiskey.”

  Evans waited until the anteroom door banged shut on the correspondent. Then he jumped for the black phone on the General’s desk. “Guardhouse…. Rafferty, give me Peterson… Peterson, this is Evans. Bring six of them twelve marbles you just found to General Dennis’s anteroom in a musette bag.” He locked his lips over the cigar and revived the ember before cutting off the paean of protest that battered his eardrums. “You heard me… in twenty minutes. Well, Jesus Christ, I’m giving you half of ’em, ain’t I?”

  He hung up the phone and stretched his long arms with tingling satisfaction. His instinct had been right. Now, for a little patience, he not only had six immediate bottles of whiskey, he had discovered an operating procedure. It always took time to get onto a new job but he had the war under control again now.

  Evans decided to give Joan outright to Eddie Cahill. Eddie had a tough time, as all dopes did, and Joan was good, if monotonous. He would give them a bottle of bourbon for a dowry, to end the thing without hard feelings. The feeling of magnanimity, expanding with his new riches, was so pleasant that Evans extended it to Dennis. He was on easy street now, even if Dennis did get canned and this Garnett drank milk. War had many privations but there was no shortage of fools who wanted to talk to generals. He was thinking of them tenderly when the door opened and General Dennis walked in.

  Chapter 2

  General Dennis returned to work that afternoon feeling a little better than usual. He had had nearly five hours of sleep—two troubled and fitful until they awoke him with the strike signal, then three of deep and blessed oblivion. His powdered-egg omelet had been no worse than usual and the arrival of a new consignment of canned grapefruit juice had brightened his meal after the Sergeant assured him there was enough for noncombat messes.

  On the way over to the office he had noted that six of yesterday’s crop of minor repairs were already restored to serviceability and practicing formation. It was a modest but tangible backlog against tomorrow.

  But as his mind came fully to life again returning anxiety dispelled his momentary relief. It would be forty-odd minutes before he would know about his losses, either in the abstract or about Ted himself. In the meantime he had to get on with the Jenks case and whatever else had come up while he slept.

  He noted the Sergeant’s flustered jump to attention and noted also that the man had been smoking with his feet on the desk. That was normal; it was also normal for them to think they were fooling a man who didn’t care. The click of the phone probably meant he had been phoning his girl in the village, but it might not.

  “Was that for me?”

  “No, sir,” said Evans blandly.

  Dennis was already crossing the room for a hurried look through the window at the sky he had not now studied for a full thirty seconds. He fired another question over his shoulder.

  “Any word since the strike signal?”

  “No, sir.”

  Dennis’s eyes were lost in the sky. Gently Evans placed the partly smoked cigar in the ash tray on the desk. He made it safely, and then scrutinized the General at the window with a curiosity he had never felt about him until this afternoon. The idea that the General, like other mortals, could be fired reduced him to the kind of estimate used for human beings.

  Evans saw a wiry, almost fragile figure, immaculately trim and erect with half a lifetime’s habit of perfect posture. A lin
gering trace of shaving soap by the left ear almost matched the pallor of that bony face, with tight skin furrowed ten years deeper than its rightful forty. Not until this moment had Evans observed that Dennis always looked deeply, permanently tired. The sharpness of those deep-set gray eyes and the alertness of that trim figure camouflaged this fatigue most of the time. Seeing him in comparative repose now Evans was struck with the resemblance of his deep inner weariness to that he had noticed in older crew members toward the end of a tour. Without waiting to be asked he poured a cup of coffee and placed it on the desk.

  Abruptly Dennis dismissed a sky he could not change and strode back to the desk. Evans held his breath. The General looked about him with a little frown of perplexity and then lifted the cigar to his mouth and inhaled deeply. The General was all business now as he reached for the coffee.

  “Ask Colonel Haley to step in, alert the weatherman, and have the guard bring Captain Jenks.”

  Evans vanished into the Ops room. Dennis reached into the top drawer of the desk and pulled out a Manila-covered file an inch thick. It was filled with orders, reports, certificates, judgments, records, qualifications; everything the Army of the United States considered worth remembering about Jenks, Lucius Malcolm, Capt. A. C., from its original satisfaction about the proportions of sugar and albumin in his urine right down to that ghastly moment this morning. Dennis had read the file through before sleeping. Now he only stared at it as if the cover might show him something the contents had not until Haley entered the room, saluting at the door.

  The very sight of his Chief of Staff comforted Dennis but it was scarcely a personal emotion. Haley was solid gold and, like many forms of that substance, somewhat lumpy. He was painstaking about his uniforms but his appearance always suggested troublesome adenoids. Dennis leaned heavily on his tireless phlegmatic capability, but the relationship between them was more the product of custom than of written regulations.

  These latter made Haley in fact Dennis’s professional wife, who did multitudinous essential chores with skill and force, creating a serene efficient background which freed the commander’s concentration for problems beyond the household. It was custom that could make this intimacy a brotherhood or a bondage. These two had served together only a relatively short time. Haley’s own notions of propriety and decorum kept the service rigid. Dennis had wondered at times if Haley, like himself, did not privately regret that the relationship was so inescapably functional. If so he never showed it. He never showed anything. He waited now, dutiful and attentive, for the moment when Dennis should be ready to give thought to the handful of papers he had brought. He always brought papers.

  “Anything from the mission?”

  “Just the strike signal I woke you for, as ordered, sir.”

  “Read it again.”

  Haley’s pudgy fingers pulled the right paper nimbly out of the sheaf. He read without emotion.

  “‘Primary plastered, Warm here. Martin.’”

  “‘Warm’…” mused Dennis.

  “Intelligence said they’d fight today, sir.”

  “But he says he plastered it, Haley.”

  “Yes, sir. And Colonel Martin is always conservative.”

  “Ted, conservative?” Dennis looked his astonishment.

  Haley had said so because he thought so, but he knew what was the trouble. In the personal notebook in which he recorded his progress toward perfection there was an entry for Exactness and Accuracy of Speech against which he often had to give himself bad grades. Tonight he would have to mark up another one; meanwhile he amplified.

  “On operational matters he is, sir. I’ve noticed it.”

  Dennis grunted. “I guess you’re right. How’s the board?”

  Haley walked to the wall and pulled back one of the curtain masks with relief. When the General was just talking it was impossible to tell where the conversation would lead or what might come up. The board was the purest, indisputable arithmetic.

  Dennis followed him over now for a close scrutiny of the welter of crisscrossing chalk columns on the blackboard. He, too, knew it was purest arithmetic and accurate. Haley would have torn a strip off anyone guilty of a digit’s error in it. Dennis, however, was thinking of the fallacy and futility of all arithmetic, of the hopelessness of trying to encompass what Bismarck had called the imponderables into arrangements of ten symbols.

  Total war, however, was not his responsibility; the Fifth Division was. This board reflected, minute by minute, every demonstrable measurement of its operating condition. If Dennis had gone to it without question Haley would have stood behind him silently. Since he had asked about it, Haley read aloud the items of foremost concern.

  “Thirteen Minor Repairs promised by fifteen hundred, eighteen promised from Major Repair by twenty-three hundred. Twenty-two Maidenheads from Modification arriving stations now. Thirty of those new ones weather-bound in Iceland took off at eleven hundred this morning. They’re already modified and we should have them for tomorrow’s board.”

  “That’s final on yesterday’s salvage?”

  “Yes, sir. Ten to Major Repair, sixteen Category E.”

  “Sixteen…”

  Haley could feel the sense of loss in Dennis’s voice. He saw that the General was a little down, anyway, probably about that Jenks business. In the circumstances it seemed to him proper to point out the compensation.

  “Of course Major Repair will cannibalize them for parts, sir. And there were only two killed in the crews.”

  Dennis nodded. “Are the newcomers from Iceland flying Ferry crews or replacements?”

  “Mostly Ferry crews. But you can see, sir, that our crew position is better since those Category E’s. And we’ve had twelve from Flak houses, eighteen from leave and sick, and twenty-eight new from Combat Crew Replacement Center today, sir.”

  The General nodded and concentrated now on the subtler revelations of the internal numbers. The board was much better than when he had gone to bed. Haley felt some of the pride in it that a modest wife knows in having made more than the most of her husband’s limited provision. He knew perfectly well how the groups felt about his incessant phoning but the General expected high serviceability. He was frowning now.

  “Why is the 641st slow again with Minor Repair, Haley?”

  “That instrument man, sir. He was just a watchmaker, you know, a civilian. His work is good but he will fall asleep on his bench toward the end of the night.”

  Evans re-entered the room in time to hear the last of this and see the General nod quietly. It was not necessary for him to return while Haley was there but today his new curiosity had brought him back. He could see now that they were almost done with the recital.

  “Fifty-eight crews then for fifty-three certain planes so far, not counting the Iceland bunch. Is all leave still canceled?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And eleven crews graduate today?”

  “If they get back, sir.”

  “We lose ’em, anyway. Let’s see, we put up a hundred and forty-four this morning…”

  “Two were Category E, sir. Collisions. And three aborted, but two of them are promised in that fifty-three for tomorrow.”

  “Fifty-three and one thirty-nine is one ninety-two. What can you promise me for tomorrow?”

  Haley looked blank. “I can’t promise anything but that fifty-three until we get today’s landing count and battle damage, sir. If you’d like a projection based on previous experience…”

  “Never mind,” said Dennis.

  They both knew that previous experience was meaningless against today’s target. That was where the projections, all the arithmetic for that matter, always collapsed. Dennis could and often did work the whole long equation in his head.

  So many missions meant so many hits; so many tons on the ones that hit (an internal equation of planes sent and distance) meant such-and-such a density of destruction in so wide a radius. Such-and-such a destruction over so wide a radius meant so many weeks, o
r degrees, of deprivation to Germany of something y useful or x vital. The net result might be a pockmark for industrial court plaster; it might be a deep true split in the structure that time and more bombs could widen.

  It was possible. It was why the Fifth Division, all the divisions, were here. Men could make the plan as Dennis had helped to do. They could be directed to execute it, as he was. They could measure resources and intentions for this execution, but they shared control of it with the weather and the Germans.

  Dennis knew the phones in Berlin were hot this minute with orders for new concrete, steel, labor, machinery. Somewhere else in Germany (Intelligence now thought it was probably Potsdam) Galland was doing his own arithmetic. His was in fighters that took only one motor and one pilot apiece and had not a quarter of the bomber’s vulnerable surface. And he always had at least six hours more to repair and redispose. In many ways Dennis envied him. On the other hand he never knew whether he’d have to fight on the morrow. Dennis did. He spoke now.

  “Ted said ‘Warm.’ Make out leave passes for 10 per cent but hold ’em till we get a count. How do the boys feel?”

  “They’re too tired to feel, sir,” said Haley.

  The arithmetic was over and Haley knew they might as well not have done it. It was always meaningless until the landing count, and battle damage from the day’s mission were tabulated. But the General checked his board after every absence from the office. Only then would he take up the rest of his problems. Haley braced himself slightly.

  “Well, what else?”

  “Another rape case, I’m afraid, sir.”

  “Combat crew or base personnel?”

  “A navigator, sir.”

  “Nuts. When’s a navigator had time to get raped?”

  Haley understood this to be partly jocular but it wasn’t safe to joke until he got past the critical point of this case.

  “Complaint was he did the raping. Last night, sir.”

  Evans was wondering how even a lieutenant could be stupid enough to get himself into trouble over something so simple. Navigators had flying pay and should have many accesses to whiskey. It was Evans’s experience of women that even if you knocked ’em flat and forced ’em while they fluttered, a few drinks and a little patience afterwards left no problems worse than a return engagement. He noted with approval that the General was as skeptical as he was.