Both figures General Grote considered intolerable.
“It’s Colonel Bucknell that’s lousing it up, General. She’s trying too hard. No give. Physical training twice a day, for instance, and a very hard policy on excuses. A stern attitude’s filtered down from her to the detachments. Everybody’s chewing out subordinates to keep themselves covered. The working girls call Bucknell ‘the monster.’ Their feeling is the Army’s impossible to please, so what the hell.”
“Relieve her,” Grote said amiably. “Make her mess officer; Ripsaw chow’s rotten anyway.” He went back to his Chinese text.
And suddenly it all began to seem as if it really might someday rise and strike out across the Strait. From Lieutenant Kramer’s Ripsaw Diary:
At AM staff meeting CG RIPSAW xmitted order CG NAAARMY designating RIPSAW D day 15 May 1986. Gen CARTMILL observed this date allowed 45 days to form troops in final staging areas assuming RIPSAW could be staged in 10 days. CG RIPSAW stated that a 10-day staging seemed feasible. Staff concurred. CG RIPSAW so ordered. At 1357 hours CG NAAARMY concurrence received.
They were on the way.
As the days grew shorter Grote seemed to have less and less to do, and curiously so did Kramer. He had not expected this. He had been aide-de-camp to the general for nearly a year now, and he fretted when he could find no fresh treason to bring to the general’s ears. He redoubled his prowling tours of the kitchens, the BOQ, the motor pools, the message center, but not even the guard mounts or the shine on the shoes of the soldiers at Retreat parade was in any way at fault. Kramer could only imagine that he was missing things. It did not occur to him that, as at last they should be, the affairs of Ripsaw had gathered enough speed to keep them straight and clean, until the general called him in one night and ordered him to pack. Grote put on his spectacles and looked over them at Kramer. “D plus five,” he said, “assuming all goes well, we’re moving this headquarters to Kiska. I want you to take a look-see. Arrange a plane. You can leave tomorrow.”
It was, Kramer realized that night as he undressed, Just Something to Do. Evidently the hard part of his job was at an end. It was now only a question of fighting the battle, and for that the field commanders were much more important than he. For the first time in many months he thought it would be nice to do a crossword puzzle, but instead fell asleep.
It was an hour before leaving the next day that Kramer met Ripsaw’s “cover.”
The “cover” was another lieutenant general, a bristling and wiry man named Clough, with a brilliant combat record staked out on his chest and sleeves for the world to read. Kramer came in when his buzzer sounded, made coffee for the two generals and was aware that Grote and Clough were old pals and that the Ripsaw general was kidding the pants off his guest.
“You always were a great admirer of Georgie Patton,” Grote teased. “You should be glad to follow in his footsteps. Your operation will go down in history as big and important as his historic cross-Channel smash into Le Havre.”
Kramer’s thoughts were full of himself-he did not much like getting even so close to the yutes as Kiska, where he would be before the sun set that night -but his ears pricked up. He could not remember any cross-Channel smash into Le Havre. By Patton or anybody else.
“Just because I came to visit your show doesn’t mean you have to rib me, Larry,” Clough grumbled.
“But it’s such a pleasure, Mick.”
Clough opened his eyes wide and looked at Grote. “I’ve generated against Novotny before. If you want to know what I think of him, I’ll tell you,” Pause.
Then Grote, gently: “Take it easy, Mick. Look at my boy there. See him quivering with curiosity?”
Kramer’s back was turned. He hoped his blush would subside before he had to turn around with the coffee. It did not.
“Caught red-faced,” Grote said happily, and winked at the other general. Clough looked stonily back. “Shall we put him out of his misery, Mick? Shall we fill him in on the big picture?”
“Might as well get it over with.”
“I accept your gracious assent.” Grote waved for Kramer to help himself to coffee and to sit down. Clearly he was unusually cheerful today, Kramer thought. Grote said: “Lieutenant Kramer, General Clough is the gun-captain of a Quaker cannon which covers Ripsaw. He looks like a cannon. He acts like a cannon. But he isn’t loaded. Like his late idol George Patton at one point in his career, General Clough is the commander of a vast force which exists on paper and in radio transmissions alone.”
Clough stirred uneasily, so Grote became more serious. “We’re brainwashing Continental Defense Commissar Novotny by serving up to him his old enemy as the man he’ll have to fight. The yute radio intercepts are getting a perfect picture of an assault on Polar Nine being prepared under old Mick here. That’s what they’ll prepare to counter, of course. Ripsaw will catch them flatfooted.”
Clough stirred again but did not speak.
Grote grinned. “All right. We hope,” he conceded. “But there’s a lot of planning in this thing. Of course, it’s a waste of the talent of a rather remarkably able general-“ Clough gave him a lifted-eyebrow look- “but you’ve got to have a real man at the head of the fake army group or they won’t believe it. Anyway, it worked with Patton and the Nazis. Some unkind people have suggested that Patton never did a better bit of work than sitting on his knapsack in England and letting his name be used.”
“All full of beans with a combat command, aren’t you?” Clough said sourly. “Wait’ll the shooting starts.”
“Ike never commanded a battalion before the day he invaded North Africa, Mick. He did all right.”
“Ike wasn’t up against Novotny,” Clough said heavily. “I can talk better while I’m eating, Larry. Want to buy me a lunch?”
General Grote nodded. “Lieutenant, see what you can charm out of Colonel Bucknell for us to eat, will you? We’ll have it sent in here, of course, and the best girls she’s got to serve it.” Then, unusually, he stood up and looked appraisingly at Kramer.
“Have a nice flight,” he said.
Kramer’s blue fourragere won him cold handshakes but a seat at the first table in the Hq Officers Mess in Kiska. He didn’t have quite enough appetite to appreciate it.
Approaching the island from the air had taken appetite away from him, as the GCA autocontroller rocked the plane in a carefully calculated zigzag in its approach. They were, Kramer discovered, under direct visual observation from any chance-met bird from yute eyries across the Strait until they got below five hundred feet. Sometimes the yutes sent over a flight of birds to knock down a transport. Hence the zigzags.
Captain Mabry, a dark, tall Georgian who had been designated to make the general’s aide feel at home, noticed Kramer wasn’t eating, pushed his own tray into the center strip and, as it sailed away, stood up. “Get it off the pad, shall we? Can’t keep the Old Man waiting.”
The captain took Mabry through clanging corridors to an elevator and then up to the eyrie. It was only a room. From it the spy-bird missiles-rockets, they were really, but the services like to think of them as having a punch, even though the punch was only a television camera-were controlled. To it the birds returned the pictures their eyes saw.
Brigadier Spiegelhauer shook Kramer’s hand. “Make yourself at home, Lieutenant,” he boomed. He was short and almost skeletally thin, but his voice was enormous. “Everything satisfactory for the general, I hope?”