14

June 1976

By June 2, 1976, the government efforts to turn up the leaders of the guerrilla movement had grown desperate, and then frantic. Each Thursday for twelve weeks the Army agent had reported to the clandestine unit of Army Intelligence and FBI agents, analysts and technicians in New York at alternating addresses. Each week the agent reported the growing waves of extraordinary preparation that the guerrilla organization was undertaking in terms of personnel, materiel, strike plans and intelligence for the first three weeks of war in the Thirty Cities. Army staffs whose two hundred years of experience had taken them into every kind of terrain on the planet with the exception of the streets, sewers, roofs, tunnels and alleys of their own cities sat mutely into long nights staring at their secret agent’s reports, projecting nuclear strikes in New York, Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, San Francisco and Los Angeles to give the urban guerrilla war an impetus that would take it past any possibility of adequate defense by government forces, and in the course of so doing account for the deaths of at least a million and a half Americans. The population of cities that had never faced a war of any consequence were certain to react with generated panic and irrationality, the psychological analyses reported, which would send them out into the streets to be in the vicinity of troops for the illusion of protection. His reports responded to this estimate with the guerrilla outline of plans that included gasoline cannon and bacterial gas to be poured into any civilian assembly of more than thirty people. In New York, where the greatest problem of staying alive and healthy had always been one of a continuity of supplies because each of the five densely populated boroughs, except the Bronx, was an island, the guerrillas planned to destroy bridges and tunnels and to mine the rivers and harbors, then to do a little light poisoning of the water supply system, mostly for the propaganda value. There would be no food except accumulated canned goods, and they wouldn’t last long. The Army would have to divert men and materiel to land the food on outer Long Island with heaviest protection along mined parkways and roads while under constant attack.

Every week the Army agent met an interrogation squad at a different, and entirely natural place, such as a dentist’s office, an upstairs barbershop, a tailor’s or a doctor’s office. Every second meeting the agent faced a frosty-eyed frightening admiral named Adler.

The agent kept adding minutiae of almost useful details of overall guerrilla intention. But the agent, under the guerrilla system, had been denied (because of the “need to know” rule) the actual times, places, methods and personnel to be used in each form of attack, and the agent’s knowledge did not go beyond the first three weeks of the war nor did it apply to the six cities in the far western action area. When Army staffs multiplied all of this vague information by the dread number of thirty intensely populated cities, all of the action to happen simultaneously, they were overwhelmed by hopelessness and by a driving despair that caused a loss of eleven officers to mental breakdown and suicide.

That was not, however, the reaction of Admiral Adler. Adler was a fattish man with a black claw for a right hand who had commanded destroyer flotillas.

He had been called out of retirement especially to tear the agent apart.

“You say the first day targets will all be hospitals. Why? How does such a strike plan originate and how is it executed?”

“I don’t know,” the agent said dully. They had been over this four times. It was a quarter to two in the morning.

“You know!” Adler yelled. “Who tells you that the hospitals are the first day target?”

“I meet with four men on what the guerrillas call their General Staff,” the agent said. “I have been told that the General Staff is fourteen men and women but I have never met more than four, always the same four. These men convey the orders which it is my job to make operational.”

“Make operational!” Adler snorted. “You don’t even know when or how they are going to happen. You are a top commander, for Christ’s sake, stupid, but you don’t know what your troops are doing.” Admiral Adler glanced at the other three men on the interrogation team, shaking his head. Of the three men one operated a tape recorder. Another operated a lie detector apparatus. The third followed the agent’s present statements by checking them against a type record of his previous statements.

“I pass orders and confirmations of logistics from a warehousing system to the city caches to five Army Corps Commanders below me,” the agent answered patiently.

“But you don’t know where these warehouses are or the location of the caches?”

“No, sir. But I know the five Army Corps commanders who do know. And I know how, when, and where to locate them.”

“Stupid, stupid! We can’t touch them yet. If we go near them, the leaders will go even farther underground. We want the leaders! How many times do I have to tell you over and over again—we must find the leaders!”

“Admiral—may I say one thing?”

“Speak up.”

“Fuck you, admiral. Like double. I took all the risks. All. You were playing bridge in some fifth-rate country club when I was being shot at in twenty-six degrees below freezing on a fucking side of a high mountain in western China. And right now—what? Who lives with the people who kill by preference—you or me, you little shit? Who can’t sleep for worrying about being under surveillance by the smartest commanders you or the United States Army ever saw? You? No, not you. I know better than any of you that the fourth of July is getting closer and closer. But I can’t do anything to save my country because they’re too smart for all of us.” The agent got up and said, “I’m going home.”

Admiral Adler shoved the agent violently back into the chair. “You know what?” he said. “If you don’t come up with real information the next time I see you, I’m going to give you back to Dr. Baum.”

There were thirty-two days left.