Sex and the High Command (24 page)

On the wall, too, the clock, set on Washington, D.C., time, ticked into December, and fretfulness grew among them. Hansen lost two hundred dollars in one hour at poker as tension drove him to draw for inside straights, and he was so irritable that he checked Pickens’ figures to confirm his losses.

All gathered in the wardroom for meals except the President who occasionally joined them at dinner to break their monotony with ceremony. On the morning of December 12, after Primrose had taken his seat at the head of the table, breakfast was served. Acworth Cobb had ordered a stack of pancakes which he invariably ate with blackstrap molasses sprinkled with wheat germ. It was a ritual Cobb had gone through many times without comment from anyone, but on this morning, after Cobb had set his shaker of wheat germ beside his plate, Pickens, in a bantering but edgy tone, asked, “What’s the wheat germ for, Ack-Ack?”

“To put lead in my pencil.”

“What do you want lead in your pencil for?” Pickens persisted. “You aren’t writing anybody.”

“I like to know it’s there, Ogie.”

Pickens was silent but watchful as Cobb prepared his stack in his usual manner, cutting a neat plug from the stack, dead center, and spearing the six-layered plug with his fork, removing it, and laying it on the edge of the plate. Then he placed a pat of butter crosswise atop the hole he had created by removing the plug, and waited until the heat from the pancakes melted the sides of the butter and allowed it to slip and fall into the hole. After the butter oozed into the hole, Cobb lifted the molasses pitcher and allowed a thin stream to flow into the hole atop the melted butter.

“Acworth,” Pickens said, “why in the hell do you do that like you do it?”

“The melting butter, Oglethorpe, lubricates the orifice and permits the molasses to flow into the hole without impediment. Once the molasses has filled the hole, it spreads out evenly to saturate the stack from the inside, thereby insuring that there’ll be no dry spots in the center of the stack.”

“Where’d you learn the trick?”

“From my old black mammy, down in Georgia. She was the wisest, kindest, and most generous woman I ever did see. I loved her in a way I could never love my mother. She raised me from a lap puppy. Many a night I fell asleep on her ample bosoms, and when I grew fretful, she would prepare a sugar teat for me, using molasses instead of sugar water, and she never used a rag for a teat. I grew to young manhood under her love and care, although she was not an old woman. When I was fourteen, she was only thirty-four, but prematurely gray.”

He sprinkled a dab of wheat germ near the hole in his stack and looked down on his handiwork with wistful eyes. “In a way, Ogie, I’m communing with that dear woman every time I fix my pancakes.”

Cobb sat without lifting knife or folk, oblivious to everything except his pancakes. It was obvious to Hansen that Pickens was not sharing his friend’s mood of reverie one whit. The Defense Secretary was glaring across the table at Cobb. Suddenly he gripped the edge of the table and leaned forward. His face was red, and the veins on his neck were jutting. “Come off it, Cobb!” he yelled. “That’s your breakfast. Either eat it or fuck it!”

Secretary of State Acworth Cobb complied by eating. Still rapt over the stack, he sliced off a chunk of pancakes and lifted it to his mouth. “No, sir, Oglethorpe, I never take a bite of pancakes and molasses without thinking of that old black mammy of mine. Did you say something, son?”

“No, sir.” Pickens subsided. “I didn’t say a thing.”

A far more delicate scene occurred at lunch on December 14 when Admiral Primrose merely commented socially on reports from the sick bay. Only ten men were in the Century Camp Hospital with knife wounds, and the admiral remarked, “Only ten cuttings, so far. For a bunch of good old Southern boys, the men are holding up well under arctic duty.”

“It would be less, sir,” Talliaferro blurted, “if you’d thought to stockpile a few broads with the boys.”

Superficially, Talliaferro’s remark sounded polite, but no mere Air Force general dared question the judgment of an admiral, and certainly not in the admiral’s presence. In the hush that fell over the table. Primrose merely smiled. “If you’ll recall, Lafe, the plan was to nuke and land if the FEM’s didn’t come through with our young ladies. Would you send fighting cocks into the pit without their spurs sharp?”

“No, sir,” Talliaferro gulped, and excused himself from the table.

“Sug,” Defense commented, “it’s her silence that’s getting to us. Here we sit, with all of our chips in the pot, and no one is calling and no one is folding.”

“Yes,” the admiral agreed. “It would help if we could get some hard-core news from home.”

“I could ring up Harvey Arnold, in BuPers,” Hansen commented.

“All Shiloh communications are to CNO,” the admiral said.

“Yes, sir,” Hansen agreed, “but Arnold would think I was calling him from a telephone booth.”

“How could you arrange that?” Defense asked.

“Distance dialing,” the captain said. “Our telephone’s connected to Thule.” He looked over at the admiral. “And Thule’s connected with Newfoundland, Newfoundland is connected to Labrador, Labrador’s connected to Nova Scotia, and Nova Scotia feeds into the continental telephone system.”

As the admiral’s mouth dropped open, Hansen thought his mild attempt at facetiousness might have been a
faux pas
, but Primrose closed his mouth on a grin. “Ben, you’re incredible. Orderly, remind me to write a commendation for Captain Hansen. Ogie, get the President.”

President Habersham entered, smiling for the first time in weeks, and said, “So, Hansen has found the purloined letter.”

By now, Hansen could recognize a literary allusion when he heard one, and that one was from Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Defense, who was scribbling on a pad, said, “Here’s a rough outline of Captain Hansen’s conversation, sir, for your approval.”

“Mr. Cobb, Admiral, let’s check this over.”

Admiral Primrose called Thule to get the call monitored, as State set up the conference call speakers, and Defense brought him the outline of his conversation. “Here’s the agenda, Ben. It’s rough, and you can take it in any order. We don’t want you to sound as if you’re giving a canned talk.”

Finally, Hansen picked up the telephone, asked the Thule operator for an outside line, and as soon as he heard the dial tone, he called the BuPers number. Four times the phone rang before it was answered by a harassed female voice. “U.S. Navy, Bureau of Personnel.”

“Harvey Arnold, please. Extension three-eight-two-one.”

“Hold it, Charlie. I’ve only got two hands.”

There was a silence of more than a minute. Then, Captain Arnold’s familiar voice boomed through the wardroom. “Captain Byrd’s office. Lieutenant Arnold, hyo.”

“Aren’t you a little confused, Harvey? You’re the captain. Byrd’s a Wave lieutenant.”

“Ben! I thought you were dead or neutered… Haven’t you heard? There are no more Waves. I’m a lieutenant in the male auxiliary. Mother Carey graciously retained a few of us, at lower ranks, of course, to keep a cadre of experienced hands around until the changeover’s completed.”

It was a petrified Hansen who read woodenly from the agenda.

“How’s the family, Harvey?”

“The wife and daughter’s OK. My son died last week from postoperative complications.”

“What operation?”

“Well, the wife and I talked it over. We didn’t want the kid riding the back of the bus all his life, so we went for broke.”

Again Hansen was forced to resort to the agenda. “How’s the traffic situation in Washington?”

In context, the question seemed irrelevant.

“None to speak of. Most of the ladies stay home.”

“Don’t men drive?” The question was all Hansen’s.

“Not when a moving violation disqualifies you. Walking’s hard on the heels but easy on the balls… Say, where are you?”

“Harvey, I’m so far out in the sticks the sun rises and sets between me and Washington. I’m with a group studying traffic problems. We did a pretty good job solving lower Manhattan’s.”

Anybody who knew anybody, Hansen felt, could tell that this agenda had been written by Oglethorpe Pickens.

“That’s interesting,” Harvey remarked, and paused. “But the ladies are controlling traffic very efficiently with electronic devices. They have them everywhere.”

Hansen understood.

“What are you doing next Saturday, Harvey?”

“My wife’s driving me over to watch the Washington Monument be torn down.”

“Harvey, I suggest you take your wife and daughter out of town. Something big’s going to break over Washington, Saturday.”

“Then I’ll want my wife and daughter right here, Ben.”

“Well, if you’re going out of town alone, don’t drop by Norad or Sac headquarters. All the holes are booby-trapped.”

“Ben, you stupid ass, I told you the phones were tapped! She’s holed up in Norad. If you’d kept your mouth shut, you could have buried her under the mountain.”

His voice was rising to a shrill, hysterical shriek, when it was suddenly silenced. Then, a familiar voice came on the line. “Thenk yop.”

Captain Byrd hung up the line.

Slowly Hansen turned and walked back to the table, sickened. His telephone call, which had been motivated by the friendliest of impulses, had been converted into an execution by Pickens’ list of questions.

“We’ve got her scared,” State said. “She ought to come out.”

However, he felt slightly better when he heard Primrose say to his orderly, “Make a note for me to recommend Captain Harvey Arnold, USN, for the Navy medal, posthumously.”

His call to Harvey bore a strange fruit.

As luck would have it, he was at poker the morning of December 20, D-Day, five thousand dollars down, depressed by the failure of their bluff and playing with a group of men so cold and cautious that they might as well have been Yankees. Hansen dealt, and State anted one hundred dollars. Defense called and raised the ante one hundred. Talliaferro stayed in the game.

Hansen had dealt himself nothing, but he was dealing and depressed so he decided to stay in the game. He held his two highest cards, an ace and ten of clubs, and drew three. Talliaferro, who had merely called, stood pat, and Hansen smelled a sandbag.

When Hansen lifted his cards and fanned them to his view, he said to himself, quickly, to keep his hands from trembling, “Death is my profession.”

Down a dry gulch he had staggered and walked into the El Dorado of the inside-straighter; the cards that unfolded to his view were the king-queen-jack of clubs. Drawing to a three-card gut shot, he had hit a royal flush.

Defense, with a half flicker of irony in his eyes, bet into Talliaferro’s pat hand. Talliaferro raised him a hundred. Now was the time, Hansen decided, to separate the cabinet officers from the protocol clerks. With icy calm, he shoved in a thousand chips, the man who had drawn three cards, the man who was known to bluff.

He was so intent on the game that he did not hear the telephone ring and would not have known it had not the orderly walked up to the table and said, “Captain Hansen, a Dr. Drexel is calling from the White House.”

“That’s it!” State said, rising with such haste that he knocked over the card table onto which Defense had already tossed his cards. Talliaferro threw his hand, four nines, face up on the floor, saying, “I’ll get the President.”

“Stall him,” Defense whispered, “until the President arrives.”

“Walk slowly to the phone. Captain,” the admiral called from the sofa where he had been reading. “He’ll wait.”

Hansen walked slowly to the phone. He picked it up and said, “Hello.”

Dr. Drexel’s familiar voice floated through the wardroom, “Ben, old buddy, what’re you doing?”

“Hi, Drex. Playing a little poker.”

“Say, if the boys don’t mind, I’d like to fly up and get in the game.”

“Let me take it under advisement, Drex…”

The President had arrived, but he was busily directing an orderly to clean up the mess around the overturned card table. He looked up at Hansen and nodded an affirmative.

“I’ve taken it under advisement. Come on up. How long will it take you to get here?”

“Oh, about three hours.”

“Good. I’ll meet you at the airport.” He read the note Defense handed him. “Is your plane equipped with IFF?”

“It’s Air Force Two.”

“Then it has IFF. Be sure the pilot has it on.”

When he returned to the table, the cards had been returned to the deck and the chips racked, and the President and the Chief of Staff wanted to brief him on what to say and what not to say to Dr. Drexel on the way from the airport.

In the dark of the Greenland noon, Hansen snowcabbed to the airport and waited in Operations for the first pulsating blip from Air Force Two to appear on the radarscope.

After the blip appeared and the operations officer contacted the pilot, it was pleasant for Hansen to stand in Operations and listen to the terse military language. It was almost as if he were back on the bridge of a ship.

“Hello, Veep. This is Thule. Alter heading to one-sixty and altitude to thirty angels. Over.”

“Hello, Thule. This is Veep. Am coming to course one-sixty, angels thirty.”

They watched as the dot swung 500 miles out, a diffuse blob but visible through the laser-induced radar window from Labrador.

“Veep, reduce speed to mach point five.”

“Wilco. Am reducing to half a mach.”

They watched for five minutes as the blip came in.

“Veep, this is Thule. Reduce to landing speed. I’m turning on the lights. Over.”

“Wilco. Thank you, Thule.”

“Veep, these are special orders from Shiloh. You have VIP aboard. After you land, all personnel will deplane. Do not attempt to take off again. Over.”

“I read you, Thule. What happens if I do?”

“You will be shot down, Veep.”

Hansen went below as the long finger of the mobile exit ramp nosed toward the taxiing plane and waited at attentive ease by the doorway to the landing ramp. In the six weeks since he had last seen Houston Drexel, several empires greater than Rome’s had fallen, but he was less interested in the profundities of history than in direct news from Uncle Sugar.