The Final Day (After, #3)(74)
“They just strike me as odd. We have no idea exactly what Bluemont is, other than it was listed before the war as a center for FEMA in the event of a national emergency. Their updated version of the Cold War bunkers is out of some movie like Dr. Strangelove from back in the ’50s and ’60s.
“Ernie and I knew about them. Gossip when we worked at IBM, people sent off for a couple of months to set up computers and when asked about what they were doing, they’d smile and act all hush-hush. You know how it is—you were military once—and how some of those with a secret just walked around all so self-important.”
John nodded. Such types always drove him crazy. Just because they had a security clearance for some particular project, they would strut around with an oh-so-superior air, like a child taunting, “I know a secret you don’t know.”
He often wondered how any secret actually could survive at all when placed into the hands of so many people with such ego issues.
“What are you leading to?”
Ernie started to speak, but Linda overran him. “I think tracing out these short notes might bear some fruit. If nothing else, there might be something classified spilled in one of them. It’s happened before, I bet.”
“Code words during World War II.” Again it was Maury. “Manhattan, Big Boy and Little Boy, Omaha and Overlord. You put them into a letter that had to go through censors and the FBI was at your door. The double edge there. The mere fact that you used those words innocently could bring a whole lot of hurt down on you, but that it did bring down a whole world of hurt meant you had stumbled onto something. There’s the story about some innocent guy who wrote crossword puzzles and by chance had the code names for three of the five invasion beaches for D-day in a puzzle. He winds up in an FBI office getting grilled. Of course, no one reported it, but suppose it had been in a radio broadcast then, or an e-mail today, and suddenly that person is grilled and others find out. That’s a tip-off.”
“And fat chance we’d have such luck today,” Ernie replied. “Anything going up to the sat and back down to wherever from Bluemont is a closed loop. If somebody screws up, who are we to even know they screwed up? Assigning a code word to an EMP, they sure aren’t going to use flashbulb or big boom. It’ll be subtle—Starfish or Rose—and we’ll never notice it.”
“I’d veto Starfish,” John said softly. “Might make you think about looking up at the stars, and beyond that, it was used by us, Starfish Prime, for a test launch of an EMP back in 1962.”
“I knew that,” Ernie replied with a smile. “I remember that test—just testing to see if you remembered.”
John wondered if he was for real or just pulling his leg, but it did not matter.
“Okay, let’s cut to the chase,” Linda said. “Whoever this lonely guy or girl is in Bluemont, the single letter R has turned up in every one of the unencrypted correspondences between the two separated lovers. ‘To R,’ and ‘Re: R.’”
“So?” John asked.
“I want to put half our assets on looking for anything related to R in any message headers and addresses.”
“You’re crazy,” Ernie retorted.
“Yes, I was; I married you,” Linda snapped back.
John held his hands up in a calming gesture, looking one to the other. Who do I side with? he wondered. Ernie was the one who had pulled off creating what was now the Skunk Works—did so under his nose—and his foresight had been proven because if still located in the college library basement, chances were Bob Scales would be onto it. But on the other side, Linda was proving that she had a deep intuitive sense about some things.
He recalled years ago, while at the War College, interviewing a retired four-star general, who as a young colonel was first wave ashore at Omaha Beach. The dignified elderly man spoke about Napoleon’s famous interview question for a candidate for promotion to general: “Are you lucky?” The old man had laughed in a soft, self-deprecating voice and said that luck was about intuition and listening to an inner voice of warning. He recalled a night when his battalion dug in to an orchard for the night and he awoke a few hours before dawn with an overwhelming dread that something was about to go wrong. He ordered his battalion to decamp immediately and pull back a quarter mile. Shortly before dawn, the Germans laid down a killing barrage on that orchard they had vacated but a half hour earlier and sent in a dozen panzers to finish the job. His battalion’s reply was to annihilate the panzers.
It wasn’t luck, he said, it was some inner warning that had awakened him. That the orchard must surely stand out on a map to the Germans—a likely and comfortable place for a battalion of motorized artillery to laager for the night—and with that realization bringing him awake, he moved out. He never doubted his intuition again or tried to rationalize it away. He acted. Often he was wrong, but the times he was right made the difference between him sitting in John’s office to be interviewed and being buried in France.
He realized his meeting with Bob at the snow-covered airport should have set off every alarm bell, for surely Bob was feeling out the situation prior to striking. He should have prepared better and had failed to do so. If he had acted, would he have fought Bob? He realized that was futile; his reaction would have been the same, but nevertheless, he should have listened to his inner warnings far more closely.