The shower helped. Wrapped in his towel, he went downstairs and dialed General Scott's quarters. There was an answer on the second ring.
"Colonel Casey, General," he said. "I hope I'm not too early."
"Not at all, Jiggs." Scott was already in full voice. "What's up?"
"Sir Harry Lancaster requested that his appointment be moved up to eight-thirty, sir. I didn't think you'd mind. I'll have the briefing papers for you by 0800."
"That's perfectly okay, Jiggs."
"I meant to call you yesterday, sir," Casey said, "but it slipped my mind, I'm afraid, and by the time I came to last night I was afraid you might have been asleep, so instead I-"
Scott interrupted. "Well, you were right. I turned in early and dropped off right away. Must have been asleep by ten-thirty. I haven't had such a good rest in months."
"Yes, sir," Casey said. "I'll see you at the office, sir."
Unless I was dreaming last night, Casey thought as he climbed the stairs again, that's a big fat fib, General.
Why would Scott lie to him? He couldn't remember a single time in a year when the chairman had told him a falsehood or had even tried to mislead him. Scott was sometimes devious-perhaps a better word was cautious-with Congress or the White House, but with his own staff he seemed to go out of his way to lay out all the facts.
And why conceal a meeting with Prentice? The senator obviously seemed to know about the alert. Perhaps there was something going on at higher echelons.
But that would be odd too. As director of the Joint Staff, Casey was supposed to know everything involving the military. Supposed to? He had to.
Marge peeked out from the bathroom, her face dripping.
"Throw me a towel, Jiggs. A dry one, please. Someday, dear, maybe you'll be famous and wealthy and we won't have to get up with the birds any more."
Casey said little at breakfast. The puzzle over Scott's remark had brought the ache back to the base of his skull and hot coffee only dulled it. He scanned the front page of the morning newspaper, but couldn't concentrate, not even on a speculative story about a "new direction" in military policy to fit the treaty. Marge fussed a little over him.
"You didn't get your sleep, Jiggs," she said.
"Not enough of it, anyway," he said. "Thanks to Don. For want of a spare, an hour was lost, or something like that."
Five days a week a Pentagon sedan called for Casey.
The olive-drab car from the motor pool was one of the perquisites of the director of the Joint Staff. It let Marge keep the family car and let Casey get his paper read before he reached the office. But today he left it folded on his lap while the early-morning breeze, funneled in through the driver's open window, blew on his face. When he finally picked up the paper, his eye fell on a small headline: "V.P. to Visit Ancestral Village." Casey read the story:
Vice-President Vincent Gianelli, who flies to Italy Wednesday for a good-will visit, is planning to spend the weekend in the remote mountain hamlet where his grandfather was born, it was learned.
The story went on with a description of Corniglio, a village high in the Apennines south of Parma. Perched on the mountains at the end of a dirt road, it contained only a few hundred residents. Gianelli would sleep in his grandfather's hut Friday and Saturday nights, and return to Rome on Sunday.
Casey thought again what an ideal weekend it was for an alert: no Congress in town, no vice-president. Not one in a dozen field commanders would suspect such a time might be chosen for a readiness exercise. No wonder the Joint Chiefs picked it.
Casey arrived at his office at 7:45. He made the customary check of his appearance in the washroom, then collected the briefing papers on Sir Harry Lancaster's appointment and walked down the E-ring corridor to the office of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He had been seated in the waiting room only a moment when Scott strode in.
"Good morning, Jiggs," he said as he swept by. "Come on in."
Casey couldn't help admiring his boss as the four-star General took his morning ration of cigars from a box on his desk and laid them neatly alongside a large green blotter. At fifty-eight he was all military. His lightly tanned face was unlined except for the tiny network of creases at the corner of each eye. He was six feet two and carried close to two hundred pounds without the slightest trace of softness. His hair was salt-and-pepper gray, a full thatch, combed neatly from a side part. A strong jaw and high cheekbones gave him a handsome, rugged face.
Casey had no doubt that those who called Scott the most popular military man since Dwight D. Eisenhower were right. Feature writers had praised him for almost thirty years: as the World War II fighter pilot who once downed seven ME-109's in a single day, as one of the first jet aces in Korea, as the brilliant air commander in Iran whose pinpoint bombing and resourceful use of tactical air cover almost made up for the inadequacies of our ground forces there.
Magazine articles often claimed to see in Scott a blend of the best of Eisenhower and MacArthur. He had, they said, Eisenhower's warm personality and appealing grin, plus MacArthur's brilliant mind, tough patriotism and slightly histrionic flair for leadership. Casey knew something else that the writers generally did not realize. Scott had an intuitive sense about politics and was widely read in the literature of that art. Casey had yet to see him make a major blunder in tactics, either military or political. When Scott protested the Korean War policies that prevented the Air Force from bombing across the Yalu, he managed to make his case without getting into the kind of trouble that ended MacArthur's career. Scott's recommendations had gone through channels, to his superiors, and had never been made public until someone (Casey guessed Murdock) slipped them to the Scripps-Howard newspapers a few months ago. Again, Scott bitterly dissented from President Frazier's decision to sue for peace in Iran rather than risk a nuclear war, but he kept his disagreement in proper bounds. Even on the subject of the disarmament treaty, when his position as chairman of the Joint Chiefs allowed him to speak publicly, he never quite crossed the line into forbidden territory.
Now he was concentrating on his work, reading rapidly through the briefing packet, wetting his thumb as he turned the pages.
"For once the British offer more than they ask," Scott said. "What do you think of this proposal that they shift an airborne regiment to our command in Okinawa?"
"I like it, sir. Those Highlanders are first-rate troops and the regimental commander is a good friend of General Faraday. They ought to work well together."
"I'd forgotten that. I think it's a pretty fair idea. Thanks, Jiggs. I think I'm up on everything now." Casey turned to go. "By the way, please tell the officers who drafted these papers that I thought they were excellent."
Now, who would think a straight guy like that would lie to a fellow before breakfast? Casey closed the door quietly behind him. Scott was already into the pile of papers awaiting his attention. The routine workday of the Joint Chiefs had begun.
Across the river at the White House the day's work was also well under way. President Jordan Lyman, like his chief military adviser, started early, and by 8:30 he had been hard at it for an hour. The difference was that Lyman was still in bed. Around him lay the jumbled sections of a dozen newspapers, evidence that he had finished his self-imposed weekly chore of sampling the press. He chose Sunday editions for their fatter letters-to-the-editor pages and the "big" editorials that publishers for some reason liked to print on the weekend.