Alas, Babylon

Mark brought a notebook out of his hip pocket. “Three thirty tomorrow morning, local time, at Orlando Municipal. Carmody—he’s Wing Commander at Ramey—has a friend in the Eastern office in San Juan. He ramrodded it through for me. The plane leaves Omaha at seven-ten tonight. One change, in Chicago.”

“Isn’t that a little rough on Helen and the kids?”

“They can sleep all the way from Chicago to Orlando. It’ll be just as tough on you, meeting them. The important thing is I got the reservation. This time of year, it took some doing.”

“What’s the great rush?” Randy demanded. “What the hell’s going on?”

“Contain yourself, son,” Mark said. “I’m going to give you a complete briefing.”

“Have you told Helen yet?”

“I sent her a cable from San Juan. Just told her I’d made reservations for tonight. She’ll understand.” He squinted at the gaudy dials and gleaming knobs on the dash. “Some buggy you’ve got here, Randy. Won’t be worth a damn to you. About Helen, she and I thrashed all this out long ago, but she won’t like it. Not at all will she like it, now that the time has come. But I’ll have her on that plane if I have to truss her up and send her air freight.”

Randy said nothing. He simply tapped the car clock, a reminder.

“Okay,” Mark said, “I’ll brief you. First strategic, then tactical.” He pushed a peanut-butter cracker into his mouth, found his pen, and began to sketch in his notebook. He drew a rough map, the Mediterranean.

Mark doesn’t cerebrate until he has a pen in his hand, Randy thought, and can see a map. Probably makes him feel comfortable, like he’s holding a pointer in the SAC War Room.

“The key is the Med,” Mark said. “For three hundred years the Russians have tried to pry open the Straits and debouch into the Mediterranean. Peter the Great, Catherine the Great, Czar

Alexander, they all tried it. Now, more than ever, control of the Med means control of the world.”

Randy nodded. Conquerors knew or sensed this. Caesar had done it, Xerxes, Napoleon, and Hitler failed. “If Xerxes had won at Salamis,” he said, “we’d all be speaking Persian-but that was a long time pre-Sputnik, and pre-ICBM. I thought the fight, now, was for control of space. Who controls space controls the world.” Mark smiled. “It can also happen just the other way around. We-by we I mean the NATO coalition-aren’t going to be allowed time to catch up with them in operational IC’s, much less control space. Now don’t argue with me. We have their War Plan.”

Randy took a deep breath and sat up straight.

“For the first time Russia has bridgeheads in the Mediterranean-here, here, and here-” Mark drew ovals on the map. “They have a fleet in the Med as powerful as ours when you match their submarine strength against our carriers. They have Turkey ringed on three sides, and if they could upset the Turkish government, and force capitulation of the Bosporus and Dardanelles, they would have won the war without fighting. The Med would be theirs, Africa cut off from Europe, NATO outflanked on the south, and one by one all our allies-except England-would fall into their laps or declare themselves neutral. SAC’s bases in Africa and Spain would be untenable and melt away. NATO would fold up, and the IR sites we’re planning never be finished.”

“That was their gambit in ‘fifty-seven, wasn’t it?” Randy asked.

“You have a good memory, Randy, and that’s a good simile. The Russians are great chess players. They rarely make the same mistake twice. Now, today, they’re making moves. It’s the same gambit-but with a tremendous difference. In ‘fifty-seven, when it looked like they were going to make another Korea out of Turkey, we warned the Kremlin that there’d be no sanctuary inside Russia. They took a look at the board and resigned the game. Then in ‘fifty-eight, after the Iraq king was assassinated, we grabbed the initiative and landed Marines in Lebanon. We got there fastest. They saw that we were ready, and could not be surprised. They were caught off balance, and didn’t dare move. This time it’s different. They’re ready to go through with it, because the odds have changed.”

“How can you know this?”

“Remember reading about the Russian General who came over, in Berlin? An air general, a shrewd character, a human being. He brought us their War Plan, in his head. This time, they’re not resigning the game. They’d still like to win the war without a war, but if we make any military countermove, we’re going to receive it.”