The Book of Truths (2 page)

At the same time that Peggy Sue was laying cold, soaking clothes over a rubber-coated pipe, not too far away (in Nebraska terms, far in Manhattan terms) on Offutt Air Force Base outside of Omaha, Horace Egan combed his hair, running the brush lightly across his scalp twenty times. No more. No less.

Every action was done to exacting standards, the way he’d lived his life for the past seventy-two years.

In most areas.

He slid the brush with depressingly little resistance through the few white wisps of what had once been his best feature: a gloriously thick head of hair that had earned him the call sign Samson back in the day when he was still allowed in the cockpit. When on active duty, he’d had his hair trimmed every other day so that it was always just on the edge of regulations. As he was part of the air force, that meant its length exceeded what the army
or marines would have allowed, but probably would have passed muster in the navy.

Then he brushed his teeth. He had his mouth mentally cordoned off into sectors, each the width of the brush, and he took the sectors with the same number of strokes, moving right to left, top to bottom, left to right, and then done. Flossing. Then mouthwash.

His teeth looked good in the mirror. The hair was a different story because the current scarcity revealed scars and divots from decades of ducking not-quite-enough under too many things, usually wings festooned with bombs and fuel tanks or the edges of hatches leading into all sorts of airplanes.

He left the washroom only after carefully drying the sink and faucet (“Ready for inspection, SIR!”—old habits died hard), and walked out into the dim lights of the closing museum, the dim being the signal for all to leave. All being the four who’d wandered in, probably after taking the wrong turn on the interstate: a family led by an overweight father and a bored mother dragging two kids who’d spent the entire time trying to get on their smart phones, bitching about the lack of reception. Egan thought the term “smart” apt, since the phones were most likely smarter than their two slack-jawed users. He had little hope for the future of the country if those two were any indication. It was the only solace he took out of being old: He wouldn’t be around to see what the next generation screwed up. The Greatest Generation was about done, the next greatest was teetering like Egan, and God help America after that.

He paused to take in the collection of planes positioned around the cavernous hangar floor. He could fly pretty much everything in the place and sometimes he didn’t know if it was irony that he and the machines were both too old to fly or just plain depression. But it was an honor to have done so much, because
in the end, they’d been successful. There’d been no nuclear exchange during the Cold War because of men like Colonel Horace Egan, USAF Retired, and planes like these. The Greatest Generation had won World War II, but Egan’s generation had won the Cold War, and they’d gotten little recognition for it.

That was their story and they were sticking to it.

This was the museum for the Strategic Air Command, although the name had recently been changed to the Strategic Air and Space Museum, trying to posture a little less ominously to the public. Not that the museum drew any more action. The air force had even done away with SAC, merging it with TAC, Tactical Air Command, into the ACC, Air Combat Command. All those letters meant nothing to civilians, but to lose their cherished organizational designation was a deep blow to those who had served for years and lost comrades-in-arms.

Egan not only knew the numerical nomenclature of every craft, but could also rattle off the nickname and story behind each, knowing many of their secrets.

The most dominating plane in the hangar was the B-36 “Peacemaker” (the military has an odd way of naming tools of death with opposite-sounding names), the largest mass-produced propeller aircraft ever built. It was also obsolete before its first flight in 1946 as jet fighters took over the air after World War II. It is a maxim of military thinking that armies (and air forces) are always preparing to fight the last war. The B-36 faced the future as an attempt to give the United States a plane that could fly to the Soviet Union, drop the oversized atomic bomb of its time, and make it back.

It was damn nice of high command to factor in the
making it back
part. Actually a rarity in military planning at the strategic level.

Egan walked over to the plane and gazed up at the nose looming above him while he unconsciously rubbed one of the scars on his head. He’d gotten that one as a seventeen-year-old crewman bailing out of a B-36 en route from Eielson Air Force Base, Alaska, to Carswell Air Force Base near Fort Worth, Texas. They’d lost three of the six engines over British Columbia in a storm. Combined with severe weather and icing, they’d been forced to bail out.

After, of course, dumping their heavy load, a nuclear warhead.

The official after-action report, classified Top Secret and only recently declassified, stated that the warhead was a dummy with conventional explosives.

That was the lie from the beginning and still was to this day if one checked Wikipedia. What is true is that it was the first nuclear “incident” where a weapon was reported lost.

The report also stated that the warhead had been dumped over the ocean, with the conventional explosives detonating on impact.

That was a double lie. They’d dropped the bomb over land. And it had not exploded on impact. It had drifted down underneath its large main parachute.

The updated report still claimed that the weapon was never recovered.

That was the final lie.

Egan knew it had been recovered and he’d seen who had recovered it and to the day he died he would never speak of it to anyone because even now, so many years later, he knew if he did, someone would come, and his retirement would shift from “still breathing and telling silly war stories” to “deceased: no check need be issued anymore.”

Shaking himself out of memories, where he seemed to get lost more and more each day, he spotted the wife of the VIP standing
by a B-52, the workhorse that replaced the B-36 and was
still
flying. Most of the B-52 bombers in the air were older than their crews.

Egan ignored that he easily could be her grandfather because getting some action wasn’t what he sought. At least that’s what he consciously told himself. But he was still a man, and he was still breathing, and hot blood still coursed through his veins, so of course it was what he sought on some level. On a deeper, visceral level, he was looking for something more mundane, which is why he volunteered at the museum (besides having no family, hating daytime TV, and having a right shoulder too damaged to play golf anymore). He wanted admiration, and that took some work at his age. He got the ritual respect given to elders, but admiration was a tougher objective. He didn’t know why her husband, the VIP, wasn’t here yet, but a pilot always took to the attack during a window of opportunity.

He’d have to tell her stories (but not about British Columbia and the nuke). Still he had plenty of others, most true, told in so many variations even he wasn’t certain anymore what the facts were. But what did it matter? The goal was to get her to understand how special he’d once been. Old pilots never die, they just have to work harder for the ego boost that used to be there for him every day, issued with the leather jacket and the crumpled cap and the silver wings, rewards for facing death every time the wheels left the ground.

He left the B-36 and headed toward the B-52 and the young woman, preparing his attack approach. He reflected that it was strange how he’d forgotten most of the missions, especially the combat bombing ones dealing death from high in the sky, but not one piece of tail that he’d ever gotten. When he was young his mind had been full of flying, but now it was full of memories of
blondes and brunettes and Asians and African Americans. They had full breasts or just enough. Bodies ranging from skinny to voluptuous; blue-eyed, green-eyed, black-eyed, brown-eyed. He’d done them all. They’d been glorious, every single damn one of them, and he missed them more with each passing day.

It never occurred to him to wonder why none had ever stayed at his side.

Maybe because the next, not yet discovered one had always been potentially more glorious?

As he got closer he realized, okay, so she wasn’t so young, but definitely a trophy wife, a second one for the old businessman who made something the government liked having and thus rated the after-hours personal tour. Still, she was holding on well to her twenties in her midthirties with the dyed hair, tight body, and expensive clothing. And Botox, surgery, and whatever else women did to hold on.

Egan had his pills to hold on, in case the occasion should arise.

Lately not much had risen, but he was always hopeful and she was alone. A gentleman would not send his wife unescorted, so that was one strike against the husband. Egan had learned, from decades of experience in seducing other men’s wives, that if you could get them to three strikes, one could most likely get to first base. He paused as that twisted metaphor confused him for a few moments, then shrugged it off as he shrugged off a lot of thoughts lately.

As he came up beside her, he allowed himself to put his hand on the small of her back, one of the few perks of being old. Her very small and lovely back.

She had her hand on the ladder that led up into the belly of the beast.

“Colonel Egan.” She nodded at him.

“Mrs. Floyd.”

“I never imagined these planes were so big.”

“Size isn’t everything, Mrs. Floyd.”

She glanced at him, a single, perfectly maintained eyebrow, arched.

“Where would you like to start?” Egan asked, gesturing with a flourish at the sprawling facility.

“Why don’t you wait ten minutes?” Mrs. Floyd responded.

“Why?”

“For my husband. The tour is really for him, isn’t it?”

“I suppose, but I’m sort of getting over the idea, if you know what I mean.”

A spark lit in his mind when she responded to the obscure reference.

“There’s a speed limit in this town, Colonel. Forty-five miles an hour.”

Egan grinned as he made the run toward first base, which in his case was more like a shuffle. “How fast was I going?”

“I’d say around ninety.”

So she wasn’t just a pretty face and tight body. “Suppose you get down off your motorcycle and give me a ticket.”

Mrs. Floyd smiled and stepped away from the hand on her back. “Suppose I let you off with a warning this time?”

First base seemed a little farther away. “Suppose it doesn’t take?”

“Suppose I have to whack you over the knuckles?”

“Suppose I burst out crying and put my head on your shoulder.”

“Suppose you try putting it on my husband’s shoulder.” And then she went off script. “Really, Colonel. He’ll be here shortly.”

“But he’s not here now.” But Egan stopped, about two-thirds to first, called out, but keeping it in mind.

“Remember what happened to Fred MacMurray by the end of that movie.” She turned from him and looked about the museum. “Only planes?”

“There are some missiles in here.” Egan stepped next to her and pointed. “Over there.”

“Ah yes. Missiles. Men love their missiles.”

He put his hand once more on her back. She didn’t step away. He let his fingers spread a bit so he could feel the slight arch of her spine as it curved outward from her tight bottom. He assumed it was tight, not being that forward yet, because women these days all worked out more than any physical drill the air force had ever pressed upon him. Sometimes he missed the softer, rounder girls of his youth. He often reflected that Marilyn Monroe would never have lasted long with today’s standards. He’d seen her in a USO show once in Korea. Or was it Alaska?

He couldn’t quite remember.

“Planes and missiles,” Mrs. Floyd said. “That’s it?” And once more she stepped away from his touch.

“No, that’s not it,” Egan said. “This hangar was built on top of the war room for SAC—the Strategic Air Command.”

“
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
,” she said, and Egan tensed. He hated that movie.

“We kept the peace,” Egan said. He strode toward a concrete bunker in the middle of the hangar, not caring if she kept pace.

She did, looking at her cell phone. “I’m not getting a signal. I can’t check on when my husband will get here.”

“The entire building is Tempest-proof,” Egan said. “Shielded. Everything in and out goes via landline.” He reached the bunker. “When nuclear weapons go off they release an electromagnetic
pulse, which fries most electronics. So, naturally, we shielded our command post.”

“
Battlestar Galactica
stuff,” Mrs. Floyd said. Egan was getting tired of the media references as they weren’t heading toward first base anymore but rather the fog covering the outfield. He opened a heavy steel door. Metal steps beckoned on one side, descending into dark depths. Large elevator doors were directly ahead.

“This isn’t part of the normal museum tour,” Egan said as he walked up to the elevator and pressed a button. The two doors rumbled open, exposing a freight elevator. The paint was gray and peeling. The museum wasn’t high on the air force’s budget priority list, although most military personnel knew how that worked. The longstanding joke was that when the air force opened a new base, they built the officers’ club first, then the golf course, then asked Congress for more money to build the airstrip and hangars.

Those in the other armed services had a lot of respect for the air force’s base priorities—as long as they were officers and played golf.

Mrs. Floyd hesitated at the hatch. “Perhaps we should wait for my husband?”

“I don’t need his shoulder,” Egan said. He looked back at her. “Do you?”

Mrs. Floyd got into the elevator. Egan hit a button and the doors shut with a solid thud. The elevator lurched and then descended, faster and faster.

“How deep are we going?” Mrs. Floyd asked.

“Five hundred feet, and passing through forty feet of reinforced concrete. This place could take a direct nuke strike and continue functioning.”