The Eleventh Man - Ivan Doig [123]
"—sir," he finished numbly, staring in recognition of the all-too-evidently waiting personification of the Threshold Press War Project.
"Greetings, Captain." A touch of gray had come to the Gable mustache, and the crinkles at the corners of the commanding eyes appeared substantially deeper. Otherwise, the colonel from Tepee Weepy perching there on the desk edge, as tailored as a rajah abroad, appeared to be taking up in mid-session from two years earlier.
"Jones"—Ben held out a hand in that direction—"may I see this week's manifest of VIP arrivals again?" The corporal plucked up the list and passed it to him as if it was about to blow up.
"Spare your eyes," the colonel advised. "Officially I'm not here."
"Here or not, sir," Ben struggled with everything wanting to uncoil within him, "you're mightily in our thoughts."
"I believe I detect a tone of concern over your recent assignments in that," the colonel responded casually. In that same tone of voice: "Take a break, Corporal. Make it a nice long one."
Jones got out of there fast.
A puckish gaze from the visitor followed him. "Your clerk looks as if he stepped straight out of the homicide lineup, have you noticed?"
"Jones is washed in the blood of the lamb, sir."
"Admirable, I'm sure." The colonel went right to business. "One of your Supreme Team articles—very nicely done, let me say—has been conspicuous by its absence in the newsprint of the land, hasn't it, Captain. Your piece about Seaman Prokosch. We had to spike that piece, and I must tell you it will remain spiked."
"I didn't figure you were saving it for the gold-leaf edition."
"You have every right to be testy about it," the colonel granted. Testy, my left nut. How about mad as hell? How about terminally pissed off, Mustache Pete? "However," the practiced voice from Tepee Weepy rippled on, "the balloon bombs are a classified secret and no mention can be—"
"Colonel?" If there was such a thing as whiplash inside the head, Ben suffered it now going from rancor to disbelief. "What's 'secret,'" he blurted, "about those? The Forest Service has people in lookout towers all over the mountains watching for the damn things, the air bases out on the Coast are trying to shoot them down, anyone out here with ears on his head has heard about Jap balloons. We aren't giving away a thing that a dozen states don't already know by saying a guy of ours met up with one."
"This was not a TPWP decision," the colonel's voice rose a notch for the first time. "It comes from highest levels—there is a complete news blackout, in all American newspapers and radio broadcasts, about the balloon bombs. Censorship has been applied for two reasons, we were told in no uncertain terms—to prevent panic by the public and to keep Japan in the dark about the balloons' effects." He favored Ben with an informative glance. "For what it's worth, Captain, the Japs' 'secret' weapon is not starting forest fires anything like intended—the incendiary devices appear to be faulty somehow."
"But not the explosive part," Ben cited darkly. "It worked just fine in blowing Sig Prokosch to bits. And why won't it do it every time some poor fool who doesn't know any better comes across a strange gadget on the beach or out in the woods? Somebody who hasn't read about it because we kept it from them?"
"That calculation, as I said, is not ours to make," the colonel uttered with the patience of bureaucratic practice. "Your understandably heartfelt article on Seaman Prokosch needs a bit of fixing, is all. Simply approach it from the angle that he was killed in a munitions mishap, let it go at that, and then—"
Ben broke in:
"Like the old newspaper joke of describing a hanged man as having been found dead under a tree, do you mean, sir?"
It drew him a look of mixed regard and reassessment. One more time, the colonel cautioned himself that these westerners were prickly.
The congressional hearing a few days before had been sailing along smoothly,