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.
He looked over at Linda, his decision made. “I’m with you. Put half your kids on it. Focus in on any communication that looks personal and has some sort of reference to R. I think you are onto something.”
“Oh, hell, I knew you’d agree with her,” Ernie growled.
“That’s because he’s smart,” Linda said with a smile. “Now I saw the way you were looking at a half-eaten sandwich, John. I still have some burger meat left over. Let me cook one up for you two visitors and enough left over to take home to your wives and kids.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
At last the weather had broken, with a stretch of over a week in the upper forties, so that there were actual bare patches of pavement visible on the roads again.
He had heard no more from Bob other than a terse daily phone exchange with each telling the other that there was nothing new to report. No further reference, especially over an open phone line, about the assassination attempt or what might be unfolding regarding Bob’s plans regarding his stated position that he would go in on Atlanta within days.
Work on the mill dam and generator to provide power to Old Fort and even on to Marion was completed, and with a ceremony to be held in downtown Old Fort at the train station, John felt it would be good for Makala to end her week of being in hiding. He found that he had to take something of a fatalistic view regarding the threat. If they, whoever they were, intended to try again, it would come, and nothing he could do would prevent it. He could either cower in hiding with his wife or live life.
The baby was due in little more than a month. Protective like any expectant father, he had first vetoed the idea of her riding down the mountain in the old Edsel. Then one of the citizens of Swannanoa had shown up toting an old-fashioned set of tire chains that would fit the car. It was something folks in the South had rarely seen, but as a boy growing up in the North, he well remembered the struggle of fitting them to the tires of his father’s car before a major storm, and he always associated the sound of them with when he was six, a blizzard on Christmas Eve, believing they were Santa’s sleigh bells. Driving to Old Fort and back would consume two gallons of gas, but the council insisted they go for the ceremony as a demonstration of the bond between the mountain communities and those down in the piedmont below.