Command Decision Read online

  “A navigator raped somebody between yesterday’s mission and today’s? Who’s complaining, the girl or her mother?”

  “Her mother, sir. Mrs. Daphne Magruder, Tranquillity Cottage, the High Street, Undershot-Overhill.”

  Evans almost laughed aloud. There was a lieutenant for you. There wasn’t an enlisted man on the station who couldn’t have handled that pair. Most of them had. Astonishment betrayed him into an inadvertence.

  “I know them people, sir.”

  “No doubt,” said the General. But his mind was on Haley, who could now see the critical question coming. It came.

  “Did our boy go there alone?”

  “I’m afraid he did, sir.”

  “Damn it, Haley, I’ve told you before: when these boys tomcat they’re to go in pairs. How can you expect one man, flying missions, to keep the whole family happy?”

  Haley understood that the General’s exasperation was directed not at him but at the essential stupidity of preventable trouble. He also knew that Dennis knew the trouble was not really preventable. They might as well order men to catch cold two at a time.

  “I’ll have the order repeated, sir.”

  “Have you told the Judge Advocate?”

  “Not yet, sir. We’re bottlenecked on navigators and this man has ten missions left to go.”

  Evans had been thinking hard. The General was always fussy about his board but there had been a warning for the wary in the minuteness of this last examination. If he was going to send ’em three days running it would be hard to get off the station tonight.

  “Excuse me, sir. Would the General like to square… that is, have this matter attended to by negotiation, sir?”

  “Yes.”

  “If I could have an order on Mess Supply for two gallons of ice cream and a few hours off, sir…”

  He let his voice trail off just short of a promise. The General looked at Haley, who considered and nodded slightly.

  “Get it and get going.”

  “With the General’s permission, sir, these matters are better attended to in the evening.”

  “All right. What else, Haley?”

  Haley now produced the letter from the Society for the Preservation of Cultural and Artistic Treasures Against Vandalism. He had been severe with the clerk who had suggested replying in counter complaint that such heavy embossed paper imperiled soldiers with piles. He knew, however, that Dennis would probably be severe with him about it, and though he extended the letter he summarized to save Dennis’s time and temper.

  “I’m afraid it was our Division hit that goddamned cathedral, sir. The man’s changed his story. You remember, sir, first he said they were shot up and lost a motor and were straggling, so he salvoed into cloud to lighten ship?”

  “They were shot up,” Dennis remembered.

  “Yes, sir. Next time out the man got hit. He’s in the hospital now and says he wants to tell the truth. He says the war’s made him an atheist and when he saw he couldn’t reach the target with his bombs anyway he threw ’em into that cathedral just to show God what he thought of one of His lower echelons.”

  Dennis ignored the proffered letter. “Could he have got home with his bombs?”

  Haley hesitated. Privately he thought the man should have but he was not being asked what he thought.

  “He was deep in France on three motors, sir.”

  “Go to the hospital and chew his ass out,” said Dennis. “Tell him for me we don’t haul bombs through the sub belt to waste on atheism or any other religion. Then write the Society it was an emergency necessary to save life. Now, anything else?”

  “Nothing of consequence, sir.”

  “Get the weatherman.”

  Haley called curtly through the Ops door and Major Belding Davis shuffled in, unmilitary, untidy, and unconcerned about it as always. He was a first-rate civilian meteorologist and he considered it the army’s own fault to have put him in uniform. It had been done because the army feared civilians as it feared everything it could not regulate; the result was to make a bad officer out of a good scientist. Davis knew that he did not need regulation. He was conscientious and diligent. The uniform simply made him resentful and the rank made everyone under him resentful.

  The one bright spot in the matter for him was that General Dennis seemed to understand this. His dealings with Davis were strictly professional and he paid no attention to anything else. Davis had learned to respect the General’s knowledge of meteorology up to a point. Beyond that it was hopeless because the General was incurably subjective about weather. He thought, as most people did, only of its accommodation to his own purposes.

  Davis was familiar, from civilian life, with this attitude, but the army had produced a variation on it that troubled him. Weather, for military understanding, was studied, estimated, and prophesied at two-hour intervals in each one of innumerable ascending headquarters from Operating Group to Hemisphere Commander.

  The readings and estimates were made by different men, having access to different parts of the same available data; the prophesies reflected the many differences. At first Davis had thought this merely another instance of the superfluity and confusion of all things military. Lately he had begun to realize that as weather was a determinative factor in action, its readings fixed responsibility for ordering that action.

  Davis now briefly explained the current readings, taking as always a grim satisfaction in the fact that even Army Regulations could not make nature disclose its intentions in the same forms to different men at two-hour intervals.

  “General Kane’s people refuse concurrence pending further development, sir. But I think when I bring you the eighteen hundred map….”

  Today Dennis was unusually impatient. He strode to the masking curtain and pulled it back from the Operational map.

  “Show me what you think on this map and keep your mouth shut about what you see,” he said.

  To orient himself, Davis studied the large, conventional 1 × 250,000 military map of England and Northern Europe. He had seldom seen this particular one on which targets were marked before attack. With a start he noted now a new little triangle of three black marks, deep in Germany. One of them had already been crossed through with savage red crayon on the plexiglass covering. It was yesterday’s target; the inference was unmistakable. Humanly Davis had been irritated by his exclusion from any part in Plans except weather itself. He forgot himself in momentary astonishment at the location of those marks. Beside him Haley picked up a piece of red crayon and eyed one of them.

  “Time for an improvement, isn’t it, sir?”

  “Improvement?” the General’s mind was on weather.

  “Colonel Martin said ‘Primary plastered,’ sir.”

  The crayon was touching the plexiglass when the General stopped Haley. He was smiling but his voice was firm.

  “Let’s let Ted do that.”

  “Of course, sir,” said Haley apologetically.

  Davis was ready now and began with an exposition of the prospects along the coastal fringe but Dennis stopped him short.

  “Never mind the coastal fringe. What about here?” His knuckles rapped the little triangle of black marks.

  “My God, sir. Three days running in there?”

  Too late, Davis remembered that he was not a part of Plans. The General did not raise his voice but it bit like a drill.

  “Major, I’m consulting you about the weather.”

  Evans could feel his hackles rise at the General’s tone and was glad those eyes were not on him. For Davis he felt no sympathy. He had sweated out too many of weather’s mistakes to pity a fool who spoke out of turn about troubles that were not his. He saw Davis recoil a little, gather himself, and run through a rapid recital of the available facts and his opinion.

  “I’m not sure Kane’s people will agree, sir, but…”

  “But you yourself think it will be all right in here?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And over the bases fo
r landing?”

  “Yes, sir. I’m sure of that.”

  “Bring anything else as you get it.”

  Davis went out, disgruntled. Dennis turned on Haley.

  “Have you anything from Headquarters?”

  This, Evans knew, also meant Kane’s, which was the next step up in the progression. Previously Evans had thought of everything above the headquarters of his own squadron as one homogeneous malevolence. Now he realized that Dennis was talking about his boss, presumably the one who might fire him. Evans kept his ears tuned.

  “They’re releasing all divisions to commanders’ discretion for tomorrow, sir. General Kane is reported so busy in that London conference that he will be unable to pass on the weather personally.”

  The Sergeant had a swift impression that Dennis and Haley might have smiled at each other if Dennis had not suddenly glanced over to where he was standing quietly at ease.

  “Any squawk from Washington yet?”

  “Not yet, sir.” This time they both smiled, as everyone did at mention of Washington, but the smiles were brief.

  “Send Captain Jenks in.”

  “Want me with you, sir?”

  “No. I’ll try him alone again.”

  Evans thought Haley looked relieved, though faintly disapproving. But all the witnesses in the army wouldn’t help that one. Evans scuttled toward the anteroom door, anxious to take delivery on his whiskey and eager to avoid Haley until the time when he could set out for the Magruders’. As he was going out he heard Dennis check Haley again at the door.

  “Has that cable come for Ted?”

  There was upwards of fifteen thousand men in the Division and every one of them felt a sense of personal concern over the kid Colonel Martin was sweating out. Prevailing opinion was that Mrs. Martin and the doctors were going to be seriously inconvenienced by the parachute; there were some, however, who said that they would never know what was happening until the new Martin phoned them that he had been forced down and was waiting in the nearest bar.

  “No, sir,” said Haley. “I’ve even checked with message center London. Mrs. Martin must be late.”

  “She’s ten years late,” said the General wearily.

  Haley and Evans both hesitated until it was plain that he had not been talking to them. After a second they went out.

  2

  Alone, Dennis removed the coffee cup from his desk and threw the cigar into the stove. Then he sat down with the Jenks file before him but he did not open it. The roots of this case went to something deeper than that file. He was going to have to dig it out of the boy himself, if there were time, if he could.

  Dennis had not wasted a second cursing the misfortune that had brought this up at the most critical juncture, so far, of the Fifth Division’s war. These things always happened in armies sooner or later. This one had happened to the Fifth Division this morning. Dennis intended, if it were militarily possible, to keep it in the Division and save the boy. From the visible evidence it did not look possible.

  Captain Jenks entered, marching correctly before a frightened guard. Dennis noted that the men in the guardhouse had been too literal about close arrest; they might have allowed Jenks to shave and change out of those flying coveralls. He returned the guard’s salute, instructed him to wait outside, and studied Jenks narrowly through the brief interval of the guard’s exit. The boy was scared but that young, rather strong face still had rigidity and restraint. No man flew nineteen missions without learning a lot about fear. This boy would still fight. Dennis took pains to make his voice as even as he could.

  “Jenks, have you thought this over?”

  “I thought it over this morning,” said Jenks.

  Dennis noticed the absence of any “sir.” This boy knew he was beyond the help of manners.

  “You’ve had more time.”

  “I don’t need more time.”

  There was always the chance that a few hours of solitude would produce a change. Dennis had already risked eleven hours for the chance. Jenks knew as well as he did that there were only thirteen hours left but he had not changed.

  “Damn it, boy, do you realize that this is serious?”

  “Yes, for both of us.”

  “What are you hinting at?”

  “I’m not getting killed to make you a record,” said Jenks. “I’ll tell the court, so, too, and the whole damned world.”

  “What else will you tell them?”

  “That you lost forty bombers, four hundred men, by deliberately sending us a hundred and sixty miles beyond fighter cover yesterday. This morning, when we’re entitled to a milk run, you order us a hundred and eighty miles beyond the fighters.”

  “Why do you think you’re entitled to a milk run?”

  “After yesterday’s losses? Besides, I can read a calendar.”

  Dennis knew now that the boy was going to fight to the end, as anyone would fight for his own life. He was working toward his one chance. Dennis couldn’t tell yet whether it was transparency or purpose that had made him expose this chance a little, almost as if to show its strength. Under the letter of the law he was doomed and he was not going to fight the law. He was going to fight Dennis himself.

  “What’s the calendar got to do with it?”

  “You big boys think flak fodder like us can’t even read, don’t you? Where does the Air Corps get all those lovely new statistical records for sorties and tonnages that General Kane announces every month? They get ’em on milk runs, the last three or four days.”

  “So you would have gone on an easy one today?”

  “I’m entitled to it.”

  Inwardly Dennis was torn between immediate relief and a darkening sense of the ultimate hopelessness of this. There had been from the first the possibility that he was dealing with a sincere, stubborn, martyr. The boy might have been risking personal fate to lighten for the others the severity of their official sentence.

  “Eleven other crews took this for their last mission.”

  “That’s their business,” said Jenks. “If you big shots are entitled to a record racket so am I.”

  His brief immediate relief faded into a heavier sadness. The contingency he had probed would have been troublesome; this was going to be tragic.

  “Did it never occur to you, Jenks, that there might be another reason for these particular record missions?”

  “What?”

  “Destroying something that can kill a lot more than four hundred boys.”

  For the first time Jenks shifted uneasily on his feet.

  “Everything in Germany is made to kill people. Why can’t we hit targets under fighter cover like General Kane promised?”

  “He didn’t promise that.”

  Jenks hesitated. Dennis knew now that he was cracking the case the boy had worked out for himself in the guardhouse. Jenks made a further effort to sound reasonable, persuasive.

  “Well, everyone who knows the army knew what General Kane meant in the press interview after that rat race over Bremfurt six weeks ago. That day we lost nineteen and the whole Air Corps turned itself inside out explaining. Yesterday we lost forty and today will be worse…” Jenks hesitated. Then, as if realizing the irrelevance of all this, he lowered his voice insinuatingly.

  “How do you think the public is going to like this?”

  Dennis had to fight down that feeling in the pit of his stomach. They were coming to the end of it. Possibly the boy’s corruption did derive from the prevarications of the army’s press and public relations policy. But Dennis had to deal with his behavior. He spoke curtly.

  “The public isn’t my business.”

  Jenks misread his short silence for intimidation.

  “What would the press say if they knew you ordered both these attacks on your own authority when General Kane was absent from weather conferences at his headquarters?”

  “That isn’t your business. You were ordered to go. After learning the target, you refused.”

  He saw Jenks stiffe
n under the gaff of the stripped, naked truth and then slowly go limp. His voice became defensive.

  “I’ve been to plenty tough targets.”

  Dennis tapped the file. “You aborted from the two toughest missions prior to yesterday.”

  “For mechanical malfunctions.” Jenks was breathing hard.

  “One engineer’s examination said: ‘Possibly justifiable.’ The other one said: ‘Defect not discernible.’”

  “It was plenty discernible to me… and my copilot will tell you the same thing, unless he’s prejudiced.”

  “He should be. He’s flying your seat today. And you’re a Squadron Commander with a D.F.C. That just makes it worse.”

  “For somebody,” said Jenks, but it was only an echo of bravado. Dennis had shattered him purposely to make him see the hopelessness of his case, to find, if it were humanly possible, some reason for this in the wreckage.

  Dennis had thought himself familiar with every form of fear. He had seen them all, from the strait-jacket cases to the ones who simply sat alone, in lounge and bar and mess, waiting consciously for the inevitable moment when their own paralyzed reflexes would give them final release. He still did not think this was simple fear. He had not thought so from the first. Something was eluding him here as it would elude the court. No court would even bother to search behind such utterly damning facts. And yet the man had flown nineteen missions. Wearily, Dennis began again.

  “Jenks, if you’ve got any legitimate reason whatever…”

  The anteroom door crashed open and the General looked up with impatience to see Evans holding it ajar. Even before he could voice a rebuke the Sergeant spoke warningly.

  “Major General R. G. Kane and party, sir.”

  Chapter 3

  General Kane seldom visited the operating echelons of his command. He would have considered any need to do so a symptom of weakness in the subordinate commander involved, a condition remediable by instant replacement. Instead he ruled with painstaking attention from desk and telephone. Like every commander he bridged a gulf between upper and nether regions, connecting and explaining them to each other. Policy and Plans came down: results went up. His duty was to execute the former and answer for the latter.