Fail Safe (3 page)

"Sir, I am General Bogan and I am calling for Colonel Cascio," General Bogan said. Standing in darkness he realized that his aide had not yet recognized him. At his words Colonel Cascio came half out of his chair, a look of pure agony on his face.

"Let the gennelmun in, Walt," Colonel Cascio's mother said. Her face spread into a mask of welcome, so broad it was grotesque. She stepped toward the door, her feet spread, balancing carefully. An amber thread of muscatel flowed from the bottle onto the floor.

The father, cued on some deep level, bowed to General Bogan. He muttered some extravagant words of welcome. "Son always speaks well of you, sir. . - honored have ya' eat with us. . . or anything. . . just anything."

There was a long moment of silence, a moment in which General Bogan understood something which he had never bothered to analyze before. Colonel Cascio's parents had Tennessee accents; they were hill people who never adjusted to the city life. And they were the reason that Colonel Casdo never spoke with a Southern accent, never drank, and was unmarried. His military career was everything.

Colonel Casdo had broken the squalid tableau. He stood straight, walked to the doorway and saluted General Bogan.

"Yes, sir," he said, and he was under perfect control. "I gather we're needed for a drill."

"That's it, Colonel Sorry to break up your time at home."

Colonel Cascio smiled thinly at him. He turned and, deliberately and heavily, as if he were swinging shut a bank vault, dosed the door. Behind the thin panels his father's voice yelped, "Ungrateful damned snot-nosed kid. So damned uppity."

They got quietly in the car and neither of them had ever spoken of the episode.

General Bogan himself came from a Tennessee family with a strong military tradition. They had always lived in the high hills of Tennessee and the land had never been able to support all of the sons. The milltary had been the only acceptable nonfarsning occupation for Bogan's family. Ever since colonial days at least one Bogan had been in the armed forces of the United States. Some had been enlisted men, some officers. During the Civil War, Bogans had fought on both sides. Bogan's grandfather had been a naval captain and an aide to Admiral Mahan. His father had been a sergeant in the infantry and had been decorated twice in World War I with the Silver Star. General Grant Lee Bogan's first and middle names came to him, not because his father had a sense of humor, but because he thought that General Grant and General Lee were the greatest generals in American history. The fact that they had fought on opposite sides did not appear to him to be ironic. Grant Lee Bogan was the first of the Bogans to be a general officer.

Bogan's attention snapped back to the War Room. It was Knapp's voice saying, "It's almost like working in a submarine, isn't it, General?"

"Only the air lock reminds me of a submarine," General Bogan said. "After a while you get used to being four hundred feet under the surface and it's just like any other job."

General Bogan was not telling the complete truth. In fact he had disliked the War Room when he was first assigned as its commander. He had joined the Air Force back in the l930s for one specific reason: to fly planes. For almost thirty-two years he had done precisely that. He had flown the early biplane fighters, later the P-38, the P-5l, and after the war he had moved into the jet bombers. He flew "by the book" and had a reputation for being more methodical than imaginative. But to his methodicalness there was also added courage. These two things had earned him the Distinguished Flying Cross during World War II.

He had been flying a P-38 escorting a group of B-17s

on a day raid over Germany. It was early in the war and the fighter pilots could not resist temptation. Some of them made passes at Focke-Wulfs which were still at a considerable distance. Others could not resist joining in a dogfight which was already being amply handed by other fighters. General Bogan flew a perfectly mechanical and orthodox flight. He stayed with the bombers he had been ordered to defend, he nursed his fuel supply, he fired only in short bursts. The result was that every other one of the escorting fighters had reached its fuel range fifty miles before the target was in sight. One by one they swung away for the flight back to England. When the B-l7s came over target General Bogan was the only fighter with them. He stumbled into a perfect setup. The Focke-Wulfs, thinking that all the fighters had left, became careless. A long string of eight fighters came up from below to strike at the bellies of the B-17s. Bogan put on additional speed and methodically began to clobber the line of German fighters. He came in on the blind port quarter of each of the Focke-Wulfs, gave a short burst directly into the cockpit hoping to kill the pilot before he could give a warning. Neatly, following the instructions he had been given during months of training, Bogan shot down six of the eight Focke-Wulfs. In avoiding the exploding debris of the six planes he pulled back quickly on the yoke and gained several hundred feet of altitude. In that moment the seventh and eighth planes saw him and instantly put on speed and began to loop back toward him. Again Bogan followed the book. Using the slight speed advantage which the P-38 had he kept just far enough ahead of the two German fighters to be Out of cannon range. They followed him almost to the English Channel, tantalized by the prospect of a kill, made reckless by the death of their six comrades. Bogan had calmly

called ahead on his radio and twenty miles from the English Channel a group of P-38s were circling high in the sky waiting for him. They came screaming down, every advantage on their side, and thirty seconds later the last of the Focke-Wulfs were destroyed.

Bogan always felt guilty about receiving the Distinguished Flying Cross. All he had done was follow instructions. Like everyone that flew in combat he had felt fear, deep and rooted and unending, as long as he was in action. But on the operation which earned his decoration he felt no special danger or risk-only the same familiar fear.

The last plane which General Bogan had flown in operation was the B-58, the Hustler. Then he had almost failed a physical examination. It was not clear-cut. The flight surgeon had hesitated, evaded his eyes, talked about the kinesthetic atrophy and its correlation with age, eye-hand reflex and reaction times. The discussion had been general but they both knew what it meant. If General Bogan insisted on flying the Hustler he would be labeled physically unfit. If he would content himself with flying the slower bombers or, fly as a copilot he could stay in the air. It had been a hard moment. Then General Bogan had mentioned, quite casually, that he'd been thinking of turning his efforts away from operations and more to strategy. "Flying is a young man's game," he lied. "We oldsters have to accept the responsibility for the big picture."

In the end the two men wordlessly agreed. Bogan would shift to a ground assignment provided he could occasionally fly T-33s, "to keep his hand in."

In two weeks General Bogan had been promoted to lieutenant general and assigned as commanding officer of the War Room.

General Bogan looked sideways at Raskob. He understood something of the disappointment that Raskob

felt. He could recall his own initial impression of the WarRoom all too sharply. General Bogan had hated the elevator. The elevator shot downwards in one long sickening 400-foot drop. The last five feet of deceleration gave him a sharp sense of leaden helplessness. Then, after the elevator doors dosed, the small room in which one stood became a compression chamber. The air pressure in the War Room was kept a little higher than normal atmosphere so that no dust could filter in to foul the machinery or atomic fallout to contaminate the humans.

Another thing that General Bogan had disliked was the smell of the room. All of the dozens of desks on the long sloping floor of the War Room were in fact electrical consoles, which contained thousands of electrical units each coated with a thin layer of protective shellac. When all of the consoles were warmed up the smell of shellac became thin and acrid, slightly sickening.

It had taken General Bogan a long time to forget the old familiar smells of airplanes. These were the muscular and masculine odors of great engines, the kerosene stink of jets, the special private smell of leather and men's sweat which hung in every pilot's cockpit.

For months the War Room had seemed effete and too delicate and also quite unbelievable. With time General Bogan had changed. He came to realize that the desks, small and gray, were incredibly intricate. The quiet, low-pitched, gray and trim room was enormously deceptive. Simplicity was its mask. Its primness hid an intricacy and complexity that, when fully apprehended, was almost an artistic concept. By radio, teletype, message, written report, letter, computers, memory banks, card sorters, conveyors, tubes, telephones, and word of mouth, information came to the War Room. It came in the form of calculations, fear,

courage, intuition, deduction, opinion, wild guesses, half-truths, facts, statistics, recommendations, equivocations, rumor, informed ignorance, and ignorant information; all were put through a rigorous procedure with one of two conclusions. Either a statement was a fact or it was expressed as a probability of fact.

General Bogan looked at Raskob and wished he could communicate his secret vision. The War Room had become a ship, a plane, a command, a place of decision. Although locked in hundreds of tons of concrete and millions of tons of earth the room gave him a curious sense of motion. Perversely, the descent by elevator came to have something of the excitement of the takeoff. From his desk, in the front center of the room, he had the impression of flying, and flying entirely on instruments. He also came to respect the crew of this strange vehicle of his imagination. They were professional, every bit as professional as any air crew he had ever commanded. He was not the faceless servant, an automatic cog, in an elaborate machine. The War Room was the most delicate of man-machines. Most of the time the machines received, analyzed, and made the decision. But just often enough it had been made clear to him that he was the commander. He was still in the profession of making decisions.

General Bogan knew that his visitors' eyes were probably now adjusted enough so that they could walk down the incline to the Command Desk.

"Colonel Cascio, will you project the naval situation in the Pacific on the Big Board?" General Bogan said, starting to walk down the slight indine.

"Yes, sir," Colonel Cascio said and walked briskly ahead of the party. By the time they reached the big central desk he had pressed down a lever labeled PACIFIC, NAVAL. Instantly the picture on the Big Board began to dissolve. The Mercator projection of the

world disappeared. For a moment the screen was blank. Then in sharp strong outline the entire screen was covered by a map of the Pacific Ocean. Colonel Casdo looked up at General Bogan. "Would you like to start with the Russian submarine layout?" Colonel Cascio asked.

General Bogan nodded agreement. Colonel Cascio pushed two levers. Suddenly the map of the Pacific contained sixteen red blips. At the same time a small machine at a nearby desk began to click and a tape poured out of its side. One of the red blips seemed to be only a few inches off of Los Angeles. Another was a foot or so due west of Pearl Harbor. The remainder were scattered around the Pacific.

Raskob went rigid. Unthinkingly he jammed his fedora on his head.

"Well, sweet Jesus, you don't mean to tell me that all those little things are Russian submarines?" Raskob asked. "That one there looks like it's almost in Los Angeles harbor."

"Sir, that Soviet submarine is approximately fifty miles from Los Angeles harbor, and in or under the high seas of the Pacific," General Bogan said quietly. "Unless they come within the three-mile limit or give signs of acting in an aggressive manner all we can do is observe them,"

"Look, General, this looks dangerous to me," Raskob said, "What the hell are they doing with submarines that dose to our shores?"

"I would presume they are doing the same thing that we do when we send U-2 planes and surveillance satellites around and sometimes over the Soviet border or set up radar stations in Turkey. They are scanning us."

It was the kind of explanation that Raskob understood. He relaxed slightly. When he spoke his voice had a new hardness.

"How do you know that those' submarines are Russian and that they are really there?" he asked.

"Sir, the Navy has spread a pattern of sonobuoys around the Pacific," Colonel Cascio said. "They are extremely sensitive instruments and they pick up any kinds of sounds that are made any place in the Pacific. The information is transmitted to Kaneohe Bay in Hawaii and interpreted by a sailor-specialist there. The specialists are so good that they can tell the difference between a whale breaking wind and a submarine blowing tanks."

Colonel Cascio turned to the machine on the adjoining desk and tore off the tape. He handed it to Raskob. "When the Big Board is switched to a specific projection a signal is tripped and simultaneously the various memory banks which store millions of bits of information are automatically searched for bits which are keyed to the projection. These come out on the tape."

The four men bent over the tape which was stretched out on the desk. The first sentence read, "Soviet submarine Kronstadt, two torpedo tubes, operated radar equipment for 30 seconds at 1820 slant line 18 slant line 00. Submerged depth 120 feet, proceeded northwest to point WLDZ at 6.5 knots." The tape went on to give estimates of the fuel level in various Soviet submarines in the Pacific, the number of messages they had transmitted, the time they had been on patrol.

"If we wanted we could tap another memory bank and get the complete strategic information on the Russian submarine situation around the entire world," General Bogan said. "That would indude the percentage of their national steel product that has gone into submarines, how many of them are nuclear powered, how many have atomic missiles. Almost anything."

"I'll be damned," Raskob said. "That's a nice gadget."