The Road to Omaha: A Novel Read online

  Life marches on, Sam. It’s combat all the way, so don’t let yourself be boondoggled if you lose a skirmish or two. Get your ass up and charge ahead!

  Words from the lowliest lowlife in the universe, the ultimate, incontestable argument for sexual abstinence or stringent birth control. General MacKenzie Hawkins, Madman Mac the Hawk, scourge of sanity and destroyer of all things good and decent. Those fatuous words, that clichéd military psychobabble, were all the slugworm could offer during Sam’s moments of desperate anguish.

  She’s leaving me, Mac. She’s actually going with him!

  Zio’s a damn good man, son. He’s a fine commander of his legions, and we who know the loneliness of command respect one another.

  But, Mac, he’s a priest, the big enchilada of priests, the Pope! They won’t be able to dance, or cuddle, or have kids or any of those things!

  Well, you’re probably right about the last two, but Zio does a hell of a tarantella, or have you forgotten?

  Nobody touches in tarantellas. They whirl around and kick up their legs, but they don’t come near each other!

  Must be the garlic. Or maybe the legs.

  You’re not listening to me. This is the mistake of her life—you should know that! For God’s sake, you were married to her, which hasn’t made me entirely comfortable these past weeks.

  Pull back your caissons, boy. I was married to all the girls, and none of them came out the worse for it. Annie was the toughest—and considering her background, maybe it was to be expected—but she caught on to what I was trying to tell her.

  What the hell was that, Mac?

  That she could be better than herself, but still be herself.

  Slugworm! Devereaux swung the wheel to the left so as to avoid an intruding guardrail on the right. All the girls, God, how did he do it? Four of the most entrancing and endowed women on earth had married the maniacal military delinquent and after each marriage had been—not amicably, but lovingly—terminated, the four divorcées had willfully, enthusiastically banded together to form their own unique club, which they called “Hawkins’s Harem.” At the press of the Hawk’s button, they all rallied around to support their former husband, whatever the time, and wherever he was in the world. Jealousies? None whatsoever, for Mac had set them free, free of the ugly chains that had bound them before he came into their lives. Sam could accept all that, for throughout the events that led up to Château Machenfeld, each former wife had succored him in his moments of hysterical crisis. Each had been not only compassionately—even passionately—warm in her efforts to extricate him from the impossible situations the Hawk had placed him in, but expert in the ways that led to his escape.

  All had left their indelible marks on both his body and his mind, all were extraordinary memories, but the most glorious of all was the ash-blond, statuesque Anne, whose large blue eyes held an innocence far more real than the reality of her past. Her neverending stream of hesitant questions on just about any topic imaginable was as startling as her voracious appetite for books, so many of which she could not possibly understand, but understand she eventually would, if it took her a month on five pages. She was truly a lady making up for the lost years, but never with a hint of pity for herself, and always giving, despite what had been taken from her so brutally in the past. And, oh God, could she laugh, her eyes lighting up with mischievous humor, yet never mean, never at the expense of another’s hurt. He loved her so!

  And the crazy bitch had opted for Uncle Zio and those goddamned leper colonies instead of a wonderful life as the wife of Sam Devereaux, attorney-at-law, eventually, inevitably, Judge Samuel Lansing Devereaux, who could enter any lousy regatta he wanted to on Cape Cod. She was bananas!

  Hurry! Hurry home and get to the lair and find solace in the memories of unrequited love. ’Tis better to have loved and lost / Than never to have loved at all. Who was that asshole?

  He sped down the street in Weston and swerved around the corner into his block. Only minutes now, and then, with the aid of the grape and the swelling sounds of The Alpine Yodelers’ one and only recording, he would retreat into the cave of his dreams, his lost dreams.

  Holy shit! Up ahead, in front of his house … was that—was it …? Jesus, it was Aaron Pinkus’s limousine! Had something happened to his mother that he knew nothing about? Had an emergency occurred while he had been screaming at O’Toole’s television set? He’d never forgive himself!

  Screeching to a stop behind Aaron’s outsized vehicle, Sam leaped out of his car and ran forward as Pinkus’s chauffeur appeared from around the hood of the limousine. “Paddy, what happened?” yelled Devereaux. “Is anything wrong with my mother?”

  “Not that I could tell, Sammy, except maybe the language, some of which I haven’t heard since Omaha Beach.”

  “What?”

  “I’d get in there if I were you, boyo.”

  Devereaux sped to the gate, leaped over it, and raced up to the door, fumbling in his pocket for his key ring. It wasn’t necessary, as the door was opened by Cousin Cora, who wasn’t necessarily altogether there. “What’s happened?” repeated Sam.

  “Hoity-toity and the little fella are either stinkin’ drunk or under the curse of a full moon while the sun’s still in the sky.” Cora hiccuped once, then belched.

  “What the hell are you talking about? Where are they?”

  “Up in your place, buster boy.”

  “My place? You mean …?”

  “That’s what I mean, big fella.”

  “Nobody goes into the lair! We all agreed—”

  “Somebody lied, I guess.”

  “Oh, my God!” screamed Samuel Lansing Devereaux, as he ran across the huge foyer of Norwegian rose marble and raced up the winding staircase to the east wing of the house.

  “Reduce power for final approach,” said the pilot calmly, looking out the side left window, wondering briefly if his wife had made the roast beef hash she had promised him for dinner. “Prepare full flaps, please.”

  “Colonel Gibson?” The radio operator sharply intruded on his thoughts.

  “Hoot’s on the toot, Sergeant. What is it?”

  “You’re not plugged into the tower, sir!”

  “Oh, sorry, I just switched them off. Anyway, it’s a beautiful sunset and we’ve got our instructions, and I have every confidence in my first officer and in you, you great communicator.”

  “Switch over, Hoot!… I mean, Colonel.”

  The pilot snapped his head over at his co-pilot, astonished to see his subordinate’s open mouth and bulging eyes.

  “They can’t do this!” cried the first officer under his breath.

  “Do what, for Christ’s sake?” Gibson instantly flipped on the tower frequency. “Repeat the information, please. The flight deck was in the middle of a crap game.”

  “Funny man, Colonel, and you can tell mat gentleman sky-jock on your right that we can do it, because it’s a direct order from Rec-Wing command, sir.”

  “I repeat, please repeat. The gentleman-jock’s in shock.”

  “So are we, Hoot!” came a second familiar voice from the tower, a fellow officer of Gibson’s rank. “We’ll fill you in when we can, but right now follow the sergeant’s instructions to your refueling coordinates.”

  “Refueling …? What the hell are you talking about? We’ve done our eight hours! We scanned up the Aleuts and into the Bering so close to the Mother we could smell her borscht. It’s time for dinner, for roast beef hash, to be exact!”

  “Sorry, I can’t say any more. We’ll bring you back as soon as we can.”

  “An alert?”

  “Not Mother Borscht, I can tell you that much.”

  “That much isn’t enough, especially that much. Are the little lucite people on their way from Quasar Tinkerbell?”

  “We’re operating direct on CINCSAC with SCD controls, is that enough for you, Hoot?”

  “It’s enough to louse up my roast beef hash,” replied a subdued Gibson. “Call my wife, will you
?”

  “Sure. All spouses and/or live-in relations will be apprised of the change in orders.”

  “Hey, Colonel!” interrupted the first flight officer. “There’s a little place in downtown Omaha, on Farnam Street, called Doogies. Around eight o’clock there’ll be a redhead at the bar—dimensions roughly thirty-eight, twenty-eight, thirty-four, and she answers to the name of Scarlet O. Would you mind sending—”

  “That’ll be enough, Captain, you’re out of order!… Did you say Doogies?”

  The mammoth EC-135 jet, known as “Looking Glass” for the Strategic Air Command’s neverending search of the skies, angled upward, accelerating airspeed to an initial altitude of eighteen thousand feet, where it banked northeast across the Missouri River, leaving Nebraska and entering the state of Iowa. On the ground, the tower at Offutt Air Force Base, the control center for worldwide Strategic Air Command, instructed Colonel Gibson to switch to a coded northwest heading and rendezvous in the still bright western sky with its refueling cargo aircraft.

  There could be no argument. The 55th Strategic Reconnaissance Wing was the host unit at Offutt and conducted global-scale observation missions, but, host or not, it, too, like its brother 544th Strategic Intelligence Wing, was subject to the needs of the Cray X-MP supercomputer, which was conveniently placed under the ostensible control of AFGWC, otherwise known as the Air Force Global Weather Control, and which few sophisticated students of SAC believed had anything to do with meteorology.

  “What’s going on down there?” asked Colonel Gibson.

  “What the hell will be going on at Doogies, that’s what I’d like to know,” said the young, angry captain. “Shit!”

  At the Pentagon, in the beflagged office of the omnipotent Secretary of Defense, a tiny man with a pinched face and a slightly askew toupee sat on three cushions behind an enormous desk and virtually spat into his telephone.

  “I’ll screw ’em! By God, I’ll ream those ungrateful savages until they beg for poison, and I won’t even let them have that! Nobody’s going to mess around with me.… I’m keeping those 135s in the air in force if I have to keep refueling night and day!”

  “I’m on your side, Felix,” said the somewhat bewildered chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, “but then I’m not air force. Don’t we have to let them come down every now and then? You’ll have four 135s in the air by tomorrow afternoon, all out of Offutt, and that’s the cutoff time. Couldn’t we share the load with the other SAC bases?”

  “No way, Corky. Omaha’s the control center, and we’re not giving it up! Haven’t you ever seen the Duke’s movies? Once you let those bloodthirsty redskin scum have an inch, they’ll sneak up behind you and take your scalp!”

  “But what about the aircraft, the crews?”

  “You don’t know anything, Corky! Haven’t you ever heard of ‘Beam me up, Scotty,’ and ‘Beam me down, Scotty’?”

  “Maybe I was in Nam.”

  “Get with it, Corky!” The Secretary of Defense slammed down the telephone.

  Brigadier General Owen Richards, supreme commandant of the Strategic Air Command, stared silently at the two men from Washington, both dressed in black trench coats and dark sunglasses under dark brown hats, which they had not removed even in the presence of the female air force major who had escorted them into his office. That discourtesy Richards had ascribed to a nonsexist military, which he had never really accepted; he usually opened a door for his secretary and she was only a sergeant, but she was also a woman, and some things were just natural. No, it was not the lack of courtesy on the Washingtonians’ part, it was the fact that they were lunatics, which probably accounted for their wearing their heavy trench coats and their dark hats on a warm summer’s day, and not removing their smoked sunglasses in the decidedly dim light of the general’s office; all the Venetian blinds were closed to block out the blinding rays of the setting sun. No, thought Owen, they were just crazy. Nuts!

  “Gentlemen,” he began calmly, in spite of his apprehensions, which had caused him to quietly open a lower drawer, where there was a weapon. “Your credentials got you in here, but perhaps you’d better give them to me for personal verification.… Don’t reach under your coats or I’ll blow you both away!” roared Richards suddenly, yanking his GI-issue .45 out of the drawer.

  “You asked for our IDs,” said the man on the left.

  “How do you expect us to show them to you?” asked the man on the right.

  “Two fingers!” ordered the general. “If I see a full hand, you’re both splattered into the wall.”

  “Your combat background makes you inordinately suspicious.”

  “You’ve got that right, I spent two years in Washington.… Put ’em on the desk.” Both did so. “Goddamn it, these aren’t IDs. They’re handwritten notes!”

  “With a signature you must certainly recognize,” said the agent on the left. “And a telephone number—which you certainly know—should you care to embarrass yourself with verification.”

  “With what you just ordered me to do, I’d check the President’s stool before I complied.” Richards picked up his private Red Line, punched four buttons, and moments later winced as he heard the voice of the Secretary of Defense. “Yes, sir, yes, sir. Orders received, sir.” The general hung up the phone, his eyes glazed, and looked at the two intruders. “All Washington’s gone crazy,” he whispered.

  “No, Richards, not all Washington, only a very few people in Washington,” said the agent on the right, keeping his voice low. “And everything must be kept max-classified—to the ultimate max. Your orders are to pretend to stand down as of eighteen hundred hours tomorrow—SAC’s command center is for all intents and purposes shut down.”

  “For Christ’s sake, why?”

  “In real phony deference to a debate over a decision that could make a new law we can’t permit,” replied the agent on the left, his eyes invisible behind the sunglasses.

  “What law?” shouted the general.

  “Probably Commie-oriented,” answered the other emissary from the nation’s capital. “They’ve got moles in the Supreme Court.”

  “Commie …? What the hell are you talking about? There’s no more Soviet Union and the goddamned Court is as far right as the communicator and his understudy could make it!”

  “Wishful thinking, soldier boy. Just get one thing through your GI brain. We’re not giving up this base! It’s our nerve center!”

  “Give it up to whom?”

  “I’ll tell you this much. Code name WOPTACK, that’s all you have to know. Keep it under your sombrero.”

  “Wop … attack? The Italian army is invading Omaha?”

  “I didn’t say that. We don’t indulge in ethnic slurs.”

  “Then what the hell did you say?”

  “Maximum-classified, General. You can understand that.”

  “Maybe I can and maybe I can’t, but what about my four aircraft that’ll be upstairs?”

  “ ‘Beam ’em down, Scotty,’ then ‘Beam ’em up.’ ”

  “What?” screamed Owen Richards, lunging up from his chair.

  “We listen to our superiors, General, and so should you.”

  Eleanor Devereaux and Aaron Pinkus, their faces devoid of color, their mouths agape, and their eyes four stationary glass orbs, sat next to each other on Sam Devereaux’s two-seater leather couch in the private off-limits office he had built for himself in the restored Victorian house in Weston, Massachusetts. Neither spoke, for neither was capable of speech; the babbling, moaning, incoherent gurgles that had emanated from Sam’s throat had, in essence, formed contiguous affirmatives to the initial questions both had posed. It did not help matters that Samuel Lansing Devereaux, paralyzed by the assault on his château’s lair, had pinned himself against the wall, both arms outstretched, palms spread, covering as many of the incriminating photographs and newspaper articles as he could manage.

  “Samuel, my son,” began the elderly Pinkus, finding his voice, but only to the extent
of a hoarse whisper.

  “Please don’t say that!” protested Devereaux. “He used to say that.”

  “Who said, who?” mumbled the barely cognizant Eleanor.

  “Uncle Zio—”

  “You don’t have an uncle named See Oh, unless you mean Seymour Devereaux, who married a Cuban and had to move to Miami.”

  “I don’t believe that’s who he means, dear Eleanor. If an old man’s memory doesn’t fail him, especially during certain negotiations in Milan, zio is ‘uncle,’ and there were more uncles than this attorney could handle in Milan. Your son is saying, literally, ‘Uncle Uncle,’ do you comprehend?”

  “Not for a minute—”

  “He is referring to—”

  “Don’t say it!” shrieked Lady Devereaux, covering her slim, aristocratic ears.

  “Pope Francesco the First,” trailed off the foremost attorney of Boston, Massachusetts, his face now the pallor of a six-week-old corpse without refrigeration. “Sammy … Samuel … Sam. How could you?”

  “It’s difficult, Aaron—”

  “It’s incredible!” thundered Pinkus, now in full if uncontrollable volume. “You exist in another world!”

  “You might say that,” agreed Devereaux, pulling his arms down from the wall and falling to his knees, then knee by knee inching his way to the small oval table in front of the miniature couch. “But you see, I had no choice. I had to do whatever that slugworm told me to do—”

  “Including the kidnapping of the Pope!” squeaked Aaron Pinkus, unable once again to find his voice.