I thought it over. ‘I don’t know,’ I said slowly. ‘I haven’t thought ahead any further than Operation Strikeout. I might stay in the army-though soldiering does not have the appeal for me it once had . . . too many copies to make out and certify. But I don’t know. I think what I really want is simply to sit under my own vine and my own fig tree.’
‘”- and none shall make you afraid”,’ he finished. ‘A good thought. But there is no reason why you shouldn’t unroll a few bolts of cloth while you are sitting there. The fig crop might fail. Think it over.’
‘I will. I surely will.’
15
Maggie and I were married the day before the assault on New Jerusalem. We had a twenty-minute honeymoon, holding hands on the fire escape outside my office, then I flew Huxley to the jump-off area. I was in the flagship during the attack. I had asked permission to pilot a rocket-jet as my combat assignment but he had turned me down.
‘What for, John?’ he had asked. ‘This isn’t going to be won in the air; it will be settled on the ground.’
He was right, as usual. We had few ships and still fewer pilots who could be trusted. Some of the Prophet’s air force had been sabotaged on the ground; a goodly number had escaped to Canada and elsewhere and been interned. With what planes we had we had been bombing the Palace and Temple regularly, just to make them keep their heads down.
But we could not hurt them seriously that way and both sides knew it. The Palace, ornate as it was above ground, was probably the strongest bomb-proof ever built. It had been designed to stand direct impact of a fission bomb without damage to personnel in its deepest tunnels-and that was where the Prophet was spending his days, one could be sure. Even the part above ground was relatively immune to ordinary H.E. bombs such as we were using.
We weren’t using atomic bombs for three reasons: we didn’t have any; the United States was not known to have had any since the Johannesburg Treaty after World War III. We could not get any. We might have negotiated a couple of bombs from the Federation had we been conceded to be the legal government of the United States, but, while Canada had recognized us, Great Britain had not and neither had the North African Confederacy. Brazil was teetering; she had sent a chargé d’affaires to St Louis. But even if we had actually been admitted to the Federation, it is most unlikely that a mass weapon would have been granted for an internal disorder.
Lastly, we would not have used one if it had been laid in our laps. No, we weren’t chicken hearted. But an atom bomb, laid directly on the Palace, would certainly have killed around a hundred thousand or more of our fellow citizens in the surrounding city-and almost as certainly would not have killed the Prophet.
It was going to be necessary to go in and dig him out, like a holed-up badger.
Rendezvous was made on the east shore of the Delaware River. At one minute after midnight we moved east, thirty-four land cruisers, thirteen of them modern battlewagons, the rest light cruisers and obsolescent craft-all that remained of the Prophet’s mighty East Mississippi fleet; the rest had been blown up by their former commanders. The heavy ships would be used to breach the walls; the light craft were escort to ten armored transports carrying the shock troops-five thousand fighting men hand-picked from the whole country. Some of them had had some military training in addition to what we had been able to give them in the past few weeks; all of them had taken part in the street fighting.
We could hear the bombing at New Jerusalem as we started out, the dull Crrump!’ the gooseflesh shiver of the concussion wave, the bass rumble of the ground sonic. The bombing had been continuous the last thirty-six hours; we hoped that no one in the Palace had had any sleep lately, whereas our troops had just finished twelve hours impressed sleep.