Alas, Babylon

Randy heads to Orlando. He listens to global news on the way and hopes that Mark is wrong about the attack.

Meanwhile, Florence meets her friend Alice Cooksey at the Pink Flamingo for lunch. Alice is a librarian. Florence tells her about Randy Bragg. She reveals that she saw the cable that Mark sent to Randy. Back at the library, Alice is disturbed. She knows Mark well enough to know that the trouble is probably real. She calls Florence and accepts her invitation to stay for the weekend.

Randy arrives at McCoy, where a pilot named Paul Hart tells him the base has been placed on alert. Mark arrives and the brothers get into Randy’s car. Mark says the American military has received the Russian war plan from a Russian general who brought it to them. It calls for launching all of Russia’s nuclear missiles so that they reach their targets simultaneously. Mark talked with the Russian General, who doesn’t believe the plan will fully work.

Mark gives Randy a check for five thousand dollars and tells him to cash it. He asks Randy to take care of Helen. Randy leaves Mark at the base and drives towards Orlando, trying not to cry.

Edgar Quisenberry is the president of the Fort Repose bank. He is forty-five years old and takes his duties seriously. He sees himself as the town’s most astute judge of character. When Randy enters the bank, Edgar ignores him. He dislikes the Braggs for many reasons, one of them secret. He dislikes Mark even more than Randy. Edgar remembers Judge Bragg, Mark and Randy’s father, humiliating him in a poker game years earlier. Bragg beat him on a large hand and then called him names.

Edgar tries to hassle Randy about the check from Mark but relents when Randy says he will take his business elsewhere. Randy tells Edgar that Mark is betting checks will not be worth anything soon, which is why he wants cash.

Randy goes next to the market and buys items on his list. He stops on the way home and buys a case of liquor. He feels guilty for not telling everyone what he knows about the coming attack.

Malachai Henry helps Randy take the items into his home. Randy gives Malachai twenty-five dollars and tells him that there might be a war coming. Malachai says they’ll be fine since they have an artesian well. Randy realizes that he never thought of the need for water.

Elizabeth McGovern—whom Randy calls Lib—comes in. She tells him he should move somewhere like New York where he can show his ambition. Once he is settled, she says she’ll follow and move in with him.

Dan Gunn, a doctor, knocks on the door, and tells Lib that her mother has diabetes. Randy tells them both about Mark’s warning, and Dan gives them some medicine to stash away.

Florence watches Randy kiss Lib goodbye, then sees him stalking something outside and thinks he is looking at her. Randy actually sees Florence’s bird, Cleo, and he tells her that he’s been watching the bird because he thought it was a species that has gone extinct. That night, Randy listens to the news at seven, but it reports nothing unusual, meaning that the attacks have not yet begun.

In the Eastern Mediterranean, two officers on the U.S.S. Saratoga watch a blip on their radar. The source fails to respond to their signals, and they classify it as hostile.

Helen and her children say good-bye to Mark. Randy reviews his to-do list. He hasn’t yet thought about how to provide heat and oil in an emergency, so he fills two gas cans at the station, then goes to the McGovern house.

The jet following the Saratoga, the source of the radar blip, vanishes. Ensign (Peewee) Cobb is the smallest pilot. He goes up to try to intercept the jet. He finds it and fires. The missile on the jet explodes. Cobb is confused about what happened.

Randy is uncomfortable at Lib’s house. He doesn’t get along with her parents, Lavinia and Bill. Bill thinks that the growing scare about a war is fake. He knows people in the Pentagon and believes that they would have informed him if there was cause for alarm. Outside, they hear jets.

At home, near midnight, Randy turns on the news. In response to the bombing caused when Cobb exploded the missile-bearing jet, American planes are now attacking the harbor of Latakia, Syria. Civilian deaths are massive.

Mark sits in his children’s rooms. He hears about the attack. He goes to the War Room, fifty feet underground, and learns details about Cobb’s attack on the jet. Cobbs’s rocket hit a bunch of explosives, accounting for the massive detonation that occurred on the ground.

Randy picks up Helen and her kids. They hear a news report about Latakia. The Air Force claims that the bombing was a mechanical error. Ben Franklin and Peyton, Helen and Mark’s children, demonstrate acceptance and resolve in reaction to the attacks. Helen tells Randy, "You see, all their lives, ever since they’ve known anything, they’ve lived under the shadow of war—atomic war. For them the abnormal has become normal. All their lives they have heard nothing else, and they expect it” (114).

Mark and General Hawker visit the Hole, a secret military base that can launch thousands of American bombers and missiles. Mark knows that if a nuclear attack comes, they will have fifteen minutes of warning at most. He asks if they can release their weapons from the authority of the president, so that if they lose communication with their superiors, they can launch them on their own. Hawker calls the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, who confirms that they can. The officers in the Hole receive an alert that several ballistic missiles are coming towards them across the sea.