Command Decision (16 page)

“Lots of girls are worried. How’s she coming with the kid?”

“It would ease her mind to know that you’re not flying.”

“I haven’t told her I am.”

“She knows you; you wouldn’t promise not to.”

“Did she ask you to work me over like this?”

“You’ve done more than your share,” said Garnett. “Think of those years before the war.”

“Somebody had to do that, too.”

Garnett paused. He was always finding himself on the defensive with Martin and he knew it was probably his own fault.

“Ted, I know you and Casey think because I don’t wear my wings to bed the way you do I don’t understand air problems. But flying isn’t the only part of this; it’s only the part for young men. The army needs your experience.”

“The way they needed it at Dayton?”

“Ted, the Chief knows now that you were right. But the whole Board heard you tell Lester he was an opinionated goddamned ignoramus. That just isn’t the way to get things done.”

“What have they done with that lousy plane since? Killed a lot of kids for nothing. Casey and I told ’em six years ago it wouldn’t fly if they amended the law of gravity. This is the same thing, Cliff. Now we’re beginning to get good bombardment from Casey and kids like Goldberg, in spite of those old bastards. This time they haven’t got either the guts or the sense to use it for anything but political logrolling with the navy.”

“Washington isn’t a bowl of cherries, Ted. But changes are coming, big changes and a lot of advancement.”

Martin laughed. “I bet. If you guys can keep this going long enough there ought to be three stars shining on every ring.”

Garnett controlled himself. It was useless to argue and his time was short.

“We’re outgrowing that, Ted. And you’ve got a lot of fine service behind you.”

Martin studied him more closely. Most of his mind had been on Dennis and Stitch. He realized that he should have known all this palaver was Cliff’s way of coming at something important, to him.

“Which way are you changing, Cliff?”

“Frankly, old man, I’m not sure. Nothing’s settled yet but I have reason to think the Chief has confidence in me, and big B-29 jobs are coming up soon, jobs that will start with two stars. The commanders will pick their own chiefs of staff and they’re a cinch for brigadiers to start. Think it over, boy.”

Martin laughed. “Me, a chief, with all those papers?”

“Adjutants do that. But if the Chief knew I could add your operational experience to my knowledge of, er, higher echelon procedure, it would wrap it up. He remembers you.”

“He should,” Martin grinned impenitently.

“Well, he admires guts.”

Through the blackout curtain on the window now they suddenly heard a protesting spasm of coughing barks from the tuning of some near-by recalcitrant motor. Inwardly Garnett cursed the distraction. Martin tensed, ears up, forehead furrowed, until slowly the spasm settled into a smooth, muted droning. Then, with a quick shake of his head, he looked back at Garnett.

“Thanks, Cliff, but as long as Casey will have me…”

“Ted, he knows there’s nothing for you here as his A 3 but those same eagles. He’d release you. Casey isn’t selfish.”

“He’d make me go but…”

“We’d be a perfect team,” urged Garnett. “I’d fight the navy and you could fight the Japs. Think it over and for God’s sake quit this flying. There’s no sense throwing yourself away when by waiting a little…”

“The Krauts aren’t waiting, Cliff.”

“Ted, there’ll be good jobs in the Jap war when this one’s washed up.” He saw Martin’s quick smile and hurried. “And those B-29’s are going to be sweet.”

Martin bit, hard. “What have they done about that frame expansion, Cliff?”

“They’re getting it. I’ll tell you the whole story later. But I want you to think about this.”

“Have you spoken to Casey?”

“Not yet but…”

“Well, don’t till I think it over or the whole deal’s off. Now, what else does Helen want?”

“She wants you to pick a godfather for the impending heir.”

“Who?”

“Well, we’ve talked about it but of course she wants your views, too. The
doctor thinks it will be a boy. R. G. Kane will be a name to conjure with someday, Ted. He’s always been fond of Helen and it would be especially appropriate if it happens while you’re still here.”

“I’ll think it over,” said Martin shortly.

“Think it all over, boy.”

Chapter 9

From a vantage point in the Ops room Evans watched Kane and Dennis pass on their way back from the light table to the Brigadier’s office. One glance showed him that the dispute had not been settled. Evans followed them into the office.

“The man doesn’t live who could tell those pictures apart,” Kane was saying.

“Preliminary twenty-three hundred serviceability, sir,” said Evans.

He had seen Dennis drop his wife’s letters for this as quickly as he now turned from Kane to the board. He could almost feel the intensity of those eyes on the hand with which he chalked the figures up. Stealing a glance around he saw with indignation that the others were making free of Dennis’s cigars, but the General had eyes only for his board.

“One twenty-six… that’s fine.”

“Them guys on the line really got their fingers out tonight, sir.”

“And they’re still promising twenty-three more in time for bomb loading?”

It had been a rule of Evans’s army career never to volunteer information. But he had broken several of his own rules today already. Again he had it in his power to assuage some of the anxiety in Dennis.

“Twenty-five, sir.”

He was rewarded by a fleeting smile. “Oh… twenty-
five
! Thank Cahill for me, Sergeant.”

“Sir, them officers are still waiting.”

“Let ’em sleep while they wait, but keep ’em.”

As Evans made for the Ops room he had a further reward in the cool self-possession of the voice Dennis now addressed to General Kane: “Sir, we’ve got the planes and the weather. The people at the groups are waiting for the order….”

In the doorway itself, however, Evans had to stand aside for the hurried passage of Prescott and Brockhurst.

Inside the office Kane looked up at the interruption with obvious relief. Swallowing his annoyance, Dennis observed now that Brockhurst was looking disturbed and skeptical, his forehead creased with a heavy frown. Prescott, however, had taken on a new animation. His face glowed with the happy flush of creative endeavour.

“General Kane, I think this time I can promise you something really good. I borrowed some of General Dennis’s draftsmen and I’m having them make three-by-five mountings for the panels, flat white board with glossy black lettering. The first title will be ‘Doom of an Axis Torpedo Factory….’”

“Jesus F. Christ!” Dennis exploded. Kane whirled on him, but Brockhurst was faster. Stepping between the two he blocked Kane with his shoulder.

“General Dennis, what’s so tragic about destroying a torpedo factory? Aren’t they worth-while targets?”

“The last one might be. The first twenty-odd will scarcely inconvenience them.”

“But if it’s a start…?” persisted Brockhurst.

Dennis didn’t care whether the correspondent ever learned the theory of bombardment or not but he had seen Kane and Garnett look at each other over that reminder. He amplified, speaking ostensibly to Brockhurst. “The navy can win the sub war in the Atlantic if they get their fingers out. Can they strike the Germans in Germany?”

Brockhurst nodded quietly but Garnett took it up now.

“You forget the interservice co-operation angle, Casey.”

“Did you get my memorandum to your bosses on that?”

“He did not,” said Kane. “You know that was too provocative.”

“It was generous, sir,” Dennis retorted. “I wrote them, Cliff, through channels, that I’d take any naval target in Germany the day after they took those battleships in and shelled the fighter plane factory at Bremen.”

“Can I use that?” asked Brockhurst eagerly.

“God no!” said Kane. “Half the United Chiefs are admirals.”

Kane had recognized that memorandum as one of the best staff papers he had ever seen, terse and undeniable with Dennis’s clarity and force. He had pondered the possibility that it might cut through some of their overriding restrictions like a blowtorch. But he had had to ponder also the hazard of applying heat to higher councils.

“Sir,” said Dennis, “may I send the order?”

“Casey, we
can’t
lose another forty planes at Schweinhafen the day after we’ve told them we destroyed it.”

“Sir, you can wait till the mission has taken off to send the correction. If you will release the Division to my discretion on the weather now…”

“No. Whichever of us got hung we’d still be sabotaging the Chief.”

“If we don’t we’re sabotaging bombardment, sir.”

2

Kane did not reply at once. He was conscious of the eyes upon him and acutely aware of the reservation with which Brockhurst was now palpably weighing everything he heard. But he was not thinking of Brockhurst or even of Dennis now. He would have to answer Dennis. What troubled him was answering the older questions which the Brigadier’s passion had rekindled deep within Kane himself.

Frowning with abstraction he walked over to Dennis’s desk, selected and cut a cigar through a silence so tense that Major Prescott did not even risk offering to light it for him. The steady drone of the motors outside carried clearly through the muffling of the blackout curtains; their insistence was a sound always in the background of his thought. It had reawakened another Kane.

“Casey,” he said, “we’re not sure. I’ve spent twenty-five years doing and preventing things that would have made or wrecked the Air Corps. The Chief has spent thirty. You don’t realize how we’ve fought…”

“No?” challenged Martin.

“
No!
” Then, remembering where Martin had spent the day, he softened his voice. “You’re giving your youth. We’ve already given ours. Casey has named a son after Billy Mitchell… long after. We took Billy’s side when it meant Siberia. They dead-ended the Chief in a cavalry school. I went with him and stayed. I amended the Army Regulation for the Disposal of Manure for him, in longhand. They didn’t give us typewriters in those days.

“But we never gave up. We did those crazy publicity stunts and we kept our own fund for the widows. We wrote anything we could get printed, we went down on our knees to Hollywood for pictures, we tested without parachutes, we flew the mail through solid glue. The year Goering won the Munich Conference without throwing a bomb our whole appropriation wasn’t as big as the New York City public safety budget… and we bought a lot of Congressmen liquor out of our own pockets to get it.”

Memory quickened in him as he spoke. But now Brockhurst broke in.

“Why don’t you tell this story?”

“You don’t sell stories in uniform,” said Kane. “We were still taking turns with obsolete junk when the country was told we were going to have an air force of fifty thousand planes. No one bothered to say how long it would take to make them, or how long it takes to make a pilot with a chance to live. Oh no! We were going to have fifty thousand planes and our boys were never going to fight in foreign wars. So the country went back to sleep and we started making a modern air force… out of promises… and what was left over after the best of our planes and teachers had been given to every goddamned ambassador in Washington.”

“Wasn’t that smart, to get experience?” asked Brockhurst.

“There wasn’t any experience for daylight precision bombardment. The Germans and British had tried it and said it couldn’t be done. The Chief said it could. And there were times when some of us had to force his hand… but there was never a time when he wasn’t taking the rap. We were just beginning to get the tools to get started when we were in it ourselves, with a double war and a fifty-thousand-plane paper air force that didn’t add up to fifty serviceable bombers….”

He shook his head, trying to clear it again. But when he looked up those steady gray eyes were still fixed inexorably upon him.

“Maybe we did boast and exaggerate. We had to get the public behind us. Who
was
telling the public the truth then? A hell of a lot of our stunting was encouraged, higher up, to cover the difference between what the country was promised and what it had.

“We used to dream of Fortresses to use in mass formations of—
six
! My God, Casey, if we’d had, even in 1941, what you’ve lost this week we would have had a Munich of our own with the Japs that would have made Hitler’s Munich look like a Rotary meeting. But instead we had diplomacy and a good-neighbor policy. Now we’re beginning to get an Air Force and you want me to risk the whole thing on a premature show-down.”

Losses hit Dennis below the belt. For him the hardest duty of the war had been learning to live with his losses. Night after night and hour after hour of every waking day they were with him always in the background of everything he had done and the foreground of everything he must do.

He had thought about them as deeply as he could think without finding solace. What explanation there might be beyond the limitations of his own thought he did not know. He realized that he had spent the best efforts of an active mind on problems essentially rational, mechanical, and soluble. The freedom Dennis was entrusted to defend depended upon his killing Jenks. It must be done as an example to other young men who might be reluctant to kill or be killed in defense of the concept of freedom that biologically indistinguishable young men in Germany were similarly encouraged to destroy.

It had all been done before and would be done again. The battle cries differed; the end was homicide. Dennis judged, on past performance, that they would continue it, intermittently, until the race had achieved its only inferable purpose in extinction. The evidence seemed plain that of all the purposes men had, the most certain and recurrent was homicide.

The experiment of precision bombardment was, he still considered, a promising therapy. It could no more end wars than a doctor can confer immortality. It did appear to promise a quicker, cheaper termination of this particular homicidal fever than the previous practices of bloodletting by bayonet. It was unproved, but the idea of reducing opposition by disarmament rather than by death seemed sound, if feasible.