Читать книгу Forbidden Area - Harry Hart Frank - Страница 7

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Katharine Hume’s apartment was as unorthodox, for a young woman, as her job. Dominating the living room, claiming most of two walls, was an enormous L-shaped desk, built to her specifications from drafting-table boards. Books were stacked on the desk. Books rose to the ceiling above it. Books monopolized most of the remaining wall space, and even narrowed the entrance corridor. From her father she had inherited a miniscule estate but one of the finest private military libraries in the country. She constantly augmented it, and acquired an impressive scientific library of her own. She never loaned a book, she never asked for any other gift, and when in New York she spent her days prowling for books on Fourth Avenue as most women scout for gowns and fur bargains on Fifth. On H-Parity Day she was reading a history of the German General Staff, Nettleship’s book on biophthora, and Sturtevant’s papers on the same subject. Her furniture, an old-fashioned sofa with graceful lines, a few still-sturdy Hepplewhite chairs, a Queen Anne lowboy—all was from the family house in Alexandria. The furniture seemed adrift, the individual pieces scattered like lifeboats in a sea of books.

She read through the late dusk until at last she could no longer ignore hunger and was forced to face a penalty of spinsterhood—the dreary alternatives, cook for herself or eat out alone. There is no joy in cooking for oneself. Even the juiciest roast is tasteless unless spiced with a friend’s praise. And eating in the gayest and most intimate French restaurant, alone, is an experience cold and cheerless as spreading a cloth on a marble counter in a bank. What she needed was a roommate, but the apartment wasn’t big enough for both a roommate and her books. That, or a permanent guy. Trouble was, the commission’s security people would frown on either a roommate or a beau unless they were provided with security clearances as aristocratic as her own. That limited the possibilities considerably. As if she talked in her sleep, or brought home classified documents. Being a logical and farsighted woman, she realized that if Raoul allowed her to eat alone often enough, she’d marry him, mother and all.

She had minute steaks in the refrigerator. She had decided to cook one of these, open a can of peas, and dine at her desk, when someone knocked. She supposed it was Callie Kantor, who worked for Interior and lived down the hall and sublimated, so she said, by raising parakeets and walking to work every morning. If it was Callie, she’d invite her out for a lobster dinner. “Come in,” she called, and opened the door.

Major Price came in, bulking ominous and piratical in the shadowed hallway, his cap tilted over his eye patch and scar. He lived only a few blocks away, on R Street, and he had been to her apartment with a few of the others for a Sunday brunch two weeks before. She was not surprised at his call. The relations of seven people who three days a week face each other across a conference table, as equals, are naturally informal. She said, “Sit down, Jess, and I’ll make you a drink. Bourbon?”

“With water. I saw your lights were on. I wanted to talk.”

“Go ahead, talk.” She went into the kitchen alcove and brought out ice and glasses and mixed drinks at her combination tea table and portable bar.

“I want to explain about this morning.”

“Not necessary,” she said. “Felix was right. You gave us all the information we required.”

“I just don’t believe in telling anyone—anyone at all—about future operations. Only ones who should know are the people who have to know to do their jobs.”

She handed him a drink and said, “Sit down, there.” She indicated the sofa. She sat at her swivel chair at the desk so her head was higher than his, an advantage if this talk was to be serious. “That reasoning is valid,” she said, “up to a point. Is there anything else?”

“Yes, there is,” he said. “There was a wing of B-Two-Nines on Okinawa in ’fifty-one. They were briefed to go up the Korean west coast and hit the Yalu bridges. Everybody in the wing was briefed. Not just the nine crews who were to make the strike. The night before the strike we lost a reconnaissance plane up there. Some of the crew bailed out, and were captured. They were good men, I suppose, but they talked. God knows what the Commie interrogators did to them. Anyway, when the nine B-Two-Nines got over the Yalu they were jumped by sixty Migs. We lost three up there, three more were washed out in forced landings in Japan, and one of the three that got back to Okinawa had its hydraulics shot out and blew up after a belly landing. We never ran unescorted B-Two-Nines up to the Yalu again. If we had got those bridges, just at that time—”

“A personal experience?” she asked.

“Yes. It was my squadron. I blew at Okinawa. The burned child dreads the fire.” He touched the scar with his fingers.

She ran her tongue along her lips. “I understand. But suppose the information I requested had been essential to our plans, our forecasts that were coming up? What then?”

“I don’t think you’d get it.”

“Why not?”

“Because you couldn’t do anything with it. Our group has neither responsibility nor authority. It can’t act, but there is always the possibility it might leak.”

She was angry all over again. She stared down into his single, unwavering, disconcerting gray eye. She told herself that this was, after all, an unofficial discussion, and he was a guest in her house, and she must not lose her temper. “Go on,” she challenged.

“What makes you think that in our echelon we are better equipped to divine the intentions of the enemy than the people right at the top, say the National Security Council?”

She was on her feet. “I’ll tell you why! Because we haven’t anything else to do! It is precisely because we have no responsibility or authority, or administration either, to worry about, that we can do this thing. The people at the top have a million things to do. They can’t devote all their time to the enemy.”

“Stop pacing up and down like a leopard,” he said, “Sit down and take it easy.”

“I won’t take it easy. I’m mad. Take the Secretary of Defense. Next to the President and perhaps the Secretary of State he’s the most important man in the country. He runs three departments, each five times as big as General Motors. These departments are designed to do different things in different ways, and there is more rivalry between them than there is, say, between Oldsmobile and Buick. If you were running fifteen General Motors, but each one more complex than General Motors, do you think you could spend all your spare waking hours reading everything that has ever been written, including all the classified files, about the schism between the Army and the Party in Russia, as Simmons did last week?”

“Well, you have a point,” Price said. “That’s something I hadn’t considered.”

“If you don’t believe in the Intentions Groups,” she demanded, “why did you join it?”

“If you’ll sit down I’ll tell you. You make me nervous.” She sat down, irritated by the ring of military command in his voice, but obeying nevertheless. “Two reasons,” he said. “First, Keatton asked me to.” Keatton was General Thomas Keatton, Commander of the Air Force. “Secondly, the Air Force hasn’t any place in its T.O. for one-eyed pilots. They don’t let one-eyed pilots fly a B-Nine-Nine, which is what I ought to be doing to earn my pay. But they will let a one-eyed Pilot sit in on the Intentions Group, and I want to stay in the Air Force.”

“You like the Air Force?”

“Maybe it can save us,” he said. “Maybe.” He finished his drink, rose, and stretched. When he stretched, his arms seemed too long for his frame, and altogether he seemed too large and unwieldy for the apartment. His eye took in the opened books on her desk, the notebook and pencils, and the fact that she still wore the gray suit. “Katy,” he said, “why don’t you relax for twenty-four hours?”

“Do you by any chance have a place in the mountains?” she asked.

“No,” he said, looking puzzled. “I don’t have anything but an apartment no bigger than this. But I do have a car and I can take you out to eat. I hate to eat alone.”

“Just wait a minute,” she said, “while I comb my hair.”