Command Decision (13 page)

“Sir,” said Evans, “my oath was to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States. It didn’t say anything about permanent stud duty.”

Dennis looked intently at the cigar in his hand while Haley wondered, enviously, if the stories about the Magruders were true. He knew that enlisted men usually had the best luck in those matters. Something in the throaty, confident ingratiation of Mrs. Magruder’s voice over the phone tonight had reminded him how long it was since he had seen Mrs. Haley.

“The United States needs navigators, Sergeant,” said the General solemnly.

“Sir,” said the horrified Evans, “I wouldn’t do this to an admiral.”

“We haven’t got an admiral handy,” said Dennis.

Evans was now sweating. General Dennis appeared to be taking inner satisfaction from the flinty glances which he alternated between Evans’s eyes and the cigar in his hand. It would be just like that poker-faced bastard, he thought, to have caught on and to be settling the whole deal outside the book without an official word about it. On the other hand it might just be his own bad conscience. He tried to match the General’s formality.

“Sir, I should like to volunteer for the Fortieth Air Army for a second tour as gunner in the Chinese theater.”

“I’ll sign the papers as soon as your mission here is accomplished,” said Dennis. “This navigator only has ten more missions till we can get him out of here.”

Joke or not, Dennis had him. Evans thought fast.

“Sir, if another man was to volunteer to substitute or at least share…”

“That’s up to you and him as long as the… er… duty is performed satisfactorily.”

“Thank you, sir,” said Evans, and executing his most correct about-face he hurried into the Ops room to find McGinnis.

Haley watched Dennis’s face soften suddenly and heard a quick chuckle as the door closed on Evans. Within himself he felt a deep inner glow. The joke had turned out perfectly and he still had the very cream of it to offer for their private delectation.

“There’s just one more point about this, sir.”

“Well…?”

“The navigator involved didn’t get back today.”

Haley saw Dennis wince, saw the life and sparkle fade into the old weary intensity of his normal face, and, too late, could have bitten his tongue off. The General turned away from him a second and then abruptly wheeled back, all business.

“Oh. Be sure to have his Group Exec go through his things personally before they’re sent home, Haley.”

“I’ve told him to, sir.”

“And you’d better tell Evans it’s love’s labor lost”—but the brief smile was heavy now.

“Sir, he works better when he’s a little tired.”

“Handle it your own way. What else?”

“The boys in the groups are in a hell of a sweat to know if there’ll be a mission tomorrow, sir.”

“So am I. Keep ’em alerted.”

“Sir, it’s after ten and they want briefing poop and bomb loads. Most of ’em haven’t had their clothes off for seventy-two hours.”

“Neither has anyone else, except Evans.” Dennis thought a minute. “Cut another field order tape using the data for Phase Two Operations Stitch.”

“Phase
two
, sir?”

“That’s what I said.”

Haley saw that deep fatigue had repossessed Dennis. But in their entire time together he had never known the General to make a mistake like this. He coughed and spoke diffidently.

“Sir, I understood that General Kane had said…”

“I didn’t say to put it on the printer. I said to cut the tape.”

The voice rasped. Haley stiffened reflexively and made for the door without a word. He had almost reached it when a softer accent stopped him:—

“Ernie…”

He turned to see Dennis striding toward him, his face relaxed and his voice contrite under its fatigue.

“I’m sorry. I’m tired.”

It gave Haley one of the bitterest moments he had known in service. He had not only bothered his chief with a joke that misfired; he had behaved like a petulant child over a well-earned rebuke. He had to gulp before he was sure he could speak without intruding further emotion into Dennis’s troubles.

“Roger, sir. You ought to get some sleep, Casey.”

Dennis smiled wryly and clapping Haley on the shoulder walked into the Ops room with him.

Chapter 7

Evans had barely cornered McGinnis in the Ops room when he noticed the hurried passage of Dennis and Haley through it on their way down to the hold. Leading the suspicious Corporal back into the relative privacy of the General’s office, Evans took out the cigar box, opened it, and extended it with a hospitable smile.

“What you after now, Evans?”

“I’m fixing to share things more with you,” said Evans.

“What else we sharing?”

Evans snapped the box shut, replaced it with a fine simulation of indifference, and shrugged his shoulders.

“Okay, if you want to be a corporal all your life.”

McGinnis looked regretfully after the vanishing cigars and thought of his lost Tech stripes. The world was certainly askew but Evans seemed to have it firmly under control.

“What you bucking for now?” he inquired more cordially.

“Dennis won’t let me go to China till I’ve got someone to take my place. It’s worth Tech stripes but if you don’t want it…”

“What’s the catch in this?”

“Security.”

“
Security!
” Evans averted his eyes from the outraged face and judged the progressive results of this remark by the almost discernible rise in the Corporal’s temperature.

“Security hell! I never told no one nothing yet!”

“You never heard nothing yet. In this job you hear the truth about things they don’t tell the President. Would you be willing to live off the station, away from the other boys?”

“For Tech stripes? I’d be glad to get away from them boys a while just to be away. I’m so sick of hearing them talk about just that one thing…”

“I know,” said Evans gravely. “It’s disgusting. Well, there’s some people want a respectable soldier to live there for protection…”

They both jumped to silent attention as Dennis, with one of his habitually unexpected appearances, walked back in, made straight for his desk, and sitting down pulled out the Jenks file. Evans winked at McGinnis, who scuttled silently out.

Alone, Evans studied the General forgivingly. The joke, if it was one, was now being projected down the hierarchy in traditional style with the most promising prospects. And if Dennis had known about the cigars his behavior had been generous.

“Excuse me, sir. You had any chow yet?”

“I’m expecting General Kane.”

“He’d be pretty stringy, sir. I’ll get you something.”

He thought he saw a swift glow of gratitude in the General’s bleak face as he went out.

Martin, entering the General’s office quietly a few minutes later, had a more detached look at his friend than he had thought of taking for years. Dennis was standing with a personnel file in his hands, looking back and forth between those black dots on the map and the file itself in a posture of ineffable weariness.

Studying him now with some of the acute attentiveness he normally preserved for the observation of engines, he wondered how Dennis took it. To ask the same question about himself would never have occurred to him. Martin had spent twenty of the last forty hours with entire aerial responsibility for the fate and effectiveness of a hundred and forty bombers through the two toughest missions of the war, to date. Sixteen of these hours he had been on oxygen, three of them he had spent shooting a machine gun for his life in the nose of a crippled Fort. He was thinking now that, as always in their long relationship, Dennis had the tough job.

Dennis, of course, was an Academy man and he liked the service; at least he had liked it once. There had been times during the latter years when Martin had begun to wonder about that. His own views of the service were so simple they had made a legend. At the reception after his graduation from flying school, the benign old colonel who had suffered most through Martin’s training had asked the newly created lieutenant what he thought of the uniform now.

“Just what I always thought, sir. It stinks, but you have nice airplanes.”

Martin had been demoted three times before reaching his captaincy. In his official file, however, there had long been established separate subcategories, a C for citations and commendations and an R for reprimands. The balance between these two had kept him almost abreast of classmates who had their first of either to earn.

He would not have cared if it hadn’t. To Martin the uniform was simply an inconvenience attendant upon life in a world full of airplanes no impecunious young man could hope to own. He considered it a fair bargain.

At his peak there were not half a dozen Americans who could fly in the same sky with him. Dennis, already declining a little with the inevitable slowing up of the thirties, had been the only one of these in uniform. They had lived and worked and flown and played together for fifteen years. It was Dennis who had twice kept Martin in the service through crises and Citation and Commendation file might not have balanced.

When Dennis had been given the Fifth Division his first personnel request had been for Martin. It had troubled his conscience at the time because he had known what Martin could do, perhaps should be doing, for the teething troubles of the B-29’s. On the other hand he had known the kind of thing Martin would and did do under most commanders. The Fifth Division was an Operational Command; its priority was clear. Only the coincidence of his overpowering personal inclination kept Dennis pondering the matter several days before deciding as he wished.

For Martin himself there had never been the slightest indecision about what he was going to do. He was grateful that Dennis’s good sense had finally saved them both the trouble of having him desert some other command to join the Fifth. It would have taken a lot of fixing.

Studying Dennis now as he pondered the Jenks file, unaware of anything else, Martin felt a hot, futile indignation. It was this kind of waste effort, this pressure for which there were no gauges, that was slowly, visibly doing things to Dennis that momentum and gravity and centrifugal force had never been able to do. Martin could feel immeasurable weight on that fragile form, weight he could not share.

It filled him with a sudden fury, not against Jenks but against the whole irrational structure that could let things like that consume Dennis. Toward Jenks himself Martin had no feeling. He knew him for a poor pilot but plenty of those got through. To ground such a man in combat was to issue a tacit invitation to malingerers. But if Jenks preferred the risk of quitting to running out six more missions it was probably a break for the crews who would have ridden with him.

He was pondering how to say this so as to comfort Dennis when Dennis himself looked up, bleakly at first, and then with the quick smile that always welcomed his recognition of Martin.

“Find it?”

The question, confronting Martin again with his own failure of that afternoon, swept the whole Jenks affair out of his mind.

“Not in the first three categories. Jake’s working out the target folders on the fourth now. Found our wandering General?”

“No.”

Dennis grunted but said nothing. They had long since effected a tacit compromise on these matters. Dennis never rebuked Martin’s habitual insubordinations when they were in private. Martin never allowed his tongue or attitude to embarrass Dennis in public. At the moment, however, he wanted above all things to get Dennis away from his troubles for respite if he could. There were few things that would divert him but his own sympathy was one of them.

“Casey, did Cliff say anything about Helen?”

“He says she’s worried.”

Dennis tossed the Jenks file on the desk now, to indicate his receptiveness if Martin wished to speak of this matter. He rarely did and latterly only with the shrugging indifference that indicated by itself the tragic finality of it. Tonight, however, he appeared to have it on his mind and Dennis listened with concentration.

“Worried about me or the kid?”

“You.”

“She always was—and with reason. I guess I was a pretty harebrained kid.”

He mused a second and it was too long. Involuntarily Dennis’s eyes had gone back to the map. The glance returned Martin abruptly to the implacable present. He spoke half bitterly.

“Now I’m Eagle-eye Martin—sure death on any target below the first three categories.”

“Quit hurting,” said Dennis sharply. “You’ve had this coming. It’s averages.”

“Not with Cliff here,” said Martin. “Why couldn’t he stay with the United Chiefs? He wore his lips out getting there.”

He waited but Dennis deliberately evaded.

“Ted, are you and Helen going to click this time?”

Martin shrugged. “Maybe. I guess she didn’t feel so secure on her own, either. I won’t be flying forever. You know the thing that pulled my ripcord with the whole Garnett family was turning down that airline job.”

“Twelve thousand a year is a lot of dough for a kid to laugh off.”

“I heard you turn down eighteen the same day, Grandpa. But those Garnetts always worshiped security, I guess because they’d been army so long. At heart the guy’s jealous of us.”

“He’s done well, Ted.”

“At staff work.”

“We had to have those guys to get planes for hoodlums like you and me,” said Dennis easily.

“Maybe,” Martin smiled fleetingly. “Helen tried everything in the book to make me one of ’em—indoors, flying tail cover on Cliff’s desk. She figures he’s a cinch for the top someday.”

“She’s probably right,” said Dennis slowly.

It always came to this, Martin reflected. He and Casey would find a few unexpected minutes together and it would be almost like the old days. Then, no matter what they were talking about, their new troubles closed in on them. It was so now and he knew he had to make the most of this time for the newest and nearest of them.

“Casey, she’s right except for one thing. No record will be worth a damn after this war without Combat Command in it. Cliff knows that. And this is still the best air command in the war.”