It was cold out at Hink Field.
It was a cold, icy-clear night, with stars.
Toward the cities, of course, the stars were obscured. And even directly overhead, they were dimmer. That was owing to the fire. It lit up Hink Field the way a flare from a private gas well lights a farmer’s barnyard. It threw an immense pall of smoke across the eastern sky. But the high, steady wind from the northwest blew it away from the airports. And at Hink, by midnight, the thermometer was down to twenty.
They were doing what they could. It wasn’t much.
The enemy had stabbed in with four planes. Not three, as the first report had stated. One had carried the bomb. Cohen got it, died with it, too late. One plane had either been strictly reconnaissance or had turned yellow. It had vanished to the west, at any rate, right after the bomb. The other two, going fast, had run around the perimeter of the city, time and again, pursued by fighters that couldn’t catch them. They’d taken their time and ultimately dropped parachute-borne aerosol-spray germ bombs. After that, one plane had calmly landed in Gordon Field and the crew had tried to surrender to the airport police. It was found that one of the crew members could speak English, just before a civilian had snatched a Tommy gun from a cop and shot the whole crew.
The other plane had been brought down by Lieutenant Pfeffer, in a jet fighter. Pfeffer had come back from that feat alive.
General Boyce had ordered his Crash Plan into effect.
He had stripped the Base to send food and medical supplies, hospital corpsmen and medical officers into the cities. He had sent all the Base fire-fighting equipment. He had called up every enlisted man and every noncommissioned officer, paymasters, bandmasters, cooks, bakers, dental hygienists—every man in uniform except the regular guard. To these he had added the mixed service personnel who had reported to him, since his was the only military establishment in the region: marines and gobs, naval officers, WACS and even WAVES, many veterans, and all the National Guardsmen who showed up there, when they learned they had no armories left. He broke out every weapon and all the ammo. He started officers organizing rescue and aid squads, emergency military police, technical-assistance squads. He sent all the communications and signal people he could spare to the Green Prairie CD authorities: he couldn’t raise anybody in River City who would accept that kind of help.
He put some of his technical staff to work on bomb determinations. He sent out his two helicopters, with special observers to swing around the stricken areas and spot and report rescue needs. He sent light planes in, and two bombers, to reinforce that mission. He prepared parachute bundles of water and food for quick air-drops into the areas where people were trapped by fire and debris—parks and playgrounds, golf courses, reservoirs, playing fields. He got volunteers, three hundred, all he needed-though most were without experience—to jump as required into such beleaguered areas.
He kept Colorado Springs fully informed as to the situation, civilian and military. He knew about the western and the northern stampede of the panic-driven people of River City before the first cars and trucks began to pass Hink. He had a road block set up and the people cared for as fast as they arrived. However, he was aware that two main refugee groups—perhaps a hundred thousand people in each-were following Route 401 which led eventually to Kansas City, and along Elk Drive toward Gordon Field, the civil airport. He sent a heavy guard to the airport to try to stop the stampede there and another, the first members of which were air-dropped, to block Highway 401 if they could.
Straggling, secondary mobs were moving west along the river valley and south from Green Prairie; General Boyce let them go: there was only the empty country ahead, but he hadn’t manpower enough to try to protect it.
He did not realize how futile such efforts would be until the account of what happened at Gordon Field came in by military phone. When his motley troops arrived there, several thousand people had already reached the airport and most had gone on past, but hundreds had turned in.
They were without control or meaningful plan—fear-maddened men and women and children who rushed indoors, promptly looted the airport concessions, smashed the furniture, insanely demolished the ticket counters, rushed out on the field, entered waiting planes, got themselves hit on runways by service equipment and, in general, turned the airport into headless hell. They were reinforced by persons arriving from the main highway at a rate of a hundred a minute or more.
A naval commander with an ice-cold voice soon requested permission to shoot. General Boyce refused it.
Twenty minutes later, the naval officer phoned again and reported that his men were being attacked and in some cases wounded or killed by mob members who grabbed away their guns and bayonetted them.
Boyce ordered the shooting.
A cluster of men in a variety of uniforms, backed into a corner of the airport, fired at an advancing, howling horde of citizens, killing and wounding many, including children. They had time for two more volleys before they were over-swarmed by a wave of madmen who yelled,
“Gestapo.” Their weapons were wrested from them and turned upon them. Most were slaughtered.
On Highway 401 the carnage came sooner because the marine colonel in command ordered shooting at the first signs of a failure of his attempt to halt traffic. The shots stopped cars and big trucks and blocked the road. Cars and trucks behind broke through a farmer’s barbed-wire fence and drove around. When they were again shot at, some drivers leaped upon their assailants in pure frenzy. Others drove cars through them. Shortly, the remnant of the colonel’s men were in hiding, behind a rise of ground, watching the maniacal hordes pour north—the flame, smoke, radiation and hell of River City hot on their backs.
Chuck Conner had not been sent out on any of these patrols because orders for him to stand by had arrived from his home base. Colonel Eames had signed the orders personally, it appeared, and although Chuck protested that he knew River City and Green Prairie better than most of the men sent in to assist, they stuck to protocol, assigning Chuck to the Operations room, pending the availability of transportation which would make it possible to carry out Chuck’s orders. So Chuck saw the fire storm from a distance of many miles. But his knowledge of the two burning cities helped in shaping plans for reconnaissance and for air-drops.
He was aware, as the night progressed, that General Boyce held himself to blame-and himself alone—for the local delay in using the sirens. Chuck remembered the discussion in the afternoon, as if he were remembering something that had happened a year or two ago; he knew that the mayor of River City was responsible for the delay, if anyone could be held blameworthy.
“The old man,” a captain said to Chuck as they studied the wall map and the incoming reports, “is in poor shape. I never saw him so quiet. He thinks he lost the people in the shopping crowds.”
“That’s foolish!” Chuck answered, staring at the map, wondering if the K. and C.L. railroad embankment would make a firebreak of any lasting value. “Because, if the sirens had let go, they’d have just traffic-blocked themselves and been penned under Ground Zero all the same!”
“You sound mighty calm about it all, Lieutenant!”
Chuck gave a ghastly smile. “That’s the only way I dare be. All my folks are—yonder—in it.”
“Oh.” The other man tapped with a pencil. “Sorry.”
Chuck’s smile was steadier. “It’s okay.”
He merely happened to be coming back from the latrine when he saw the general step out through the door onto the field. It was a peculiar thing for him to do and odd for him to be alone and Chuck stepped out to speak to him. But the general had already walked some distance onto a hardstand and was staring at the fire. He was wearing side arms. Chuck had thought nothing of that.
General Boyce whipped out his forty-five and shot himself through the head so suddenly that Charles couldn’t even shout. And before Charles reached his side, three grease monkeys had arrived and were kneeling.
Toward midnight, Charles was assigned a patrol and ordered into River City to do what he could about panic, looting, whatever might be handled. “Only,” said the tragic-faced colonel who gave the orders, “don’t expose your men to fire unless you have to. Don’t try to obstruct any big groups of human beings. We can only let the madness itself burn out of them—and God help whoever they encounter!”