Trinity's Child (15 page)

The old man molded the pitch, planted it in a scooped-out trough beneath their shelter tree, and surrounded it with soaked fir needles. With one match the pitch snapped magically into flame, the needles steaming for a second and then crackling too. Expertly, Big Kazaklis added drenched twigs, then wet sticks, and finally soaked logs, the flames from one layer sapping the water out of the next. In a moment the boy was warm, in twenty minutes dry, even with the rain still pelting his poncho.

“That big rottin' tree's always gonna be there, bub, with pitch to keep you warm and bugs to keep your stomach full, if'n ya needs 'em. Remember that. Some things is eee-ternal, always there for ya, like the mountains.”

The boy stared at the crumbling home of the beetle and the pitch. It was truly a miracle to build a fire in the rain, to create warmth in the cold, and his father had done it. But he could no longer give his pa any satisfaction in the woods.

“Nope,” the kid said quietly. “It's gonna rot away and be gone. Just like you, Pa. Just like me.” The father looked at the son as forlornly as he could show, because he knew that somehow he had driven the dreams out of the kid—that the boy, barely turned twelve, no longer saw the past or the future. He only saw the present, and that truly was sad, even to Big Kazaklis.

“Oh, yer right about that, bub,” his pa said. “But yer wrong too. Don't know if yer ever gonna unnerstand.”

Polar Bear One
passed into Canada east of Penticton, droned north over the Caribou Mountains of British Columbia, and sliced across the corner of Alberta on a course toward the two immense frozen lakes of the Canadian Northwest Territories, Great Slave and Great Bear. The next hour passed more rapidly than any of the crew expected. PRP cluttered their lives with chores, leaving little time for inward trips, those being risky.

Kazaklis picked up a few radio transmissions from other aircraft, all civilian, most of the calls coming on the emergency frequency but none of them coded JIMA 14, the B-52's identification for military emergencies. Most were only marginally coherent and Kazaklis answered none. He received no military communications and he slapped a total ban on listening to ground radio. He did not need any more Crazy Eddies or Conway Twittys, and surely not from Coquille.

Kazaklis ordered O'Toole's body placed downstairs behind Tyler and Radnor in the little basement walkway leading to the sealed-off bomb bay. It was the only place in the small crew compartment of the huge bomber where six feet of now-excess baggage could be stowed relatively inconspicuously. Radnor came up, skittishly, to help Halupalai carry the body.

The PRP psychiatrists, had they been aboard for this ultimate laboratory test of their wisdom, would have observed Tyler with fascination. He ignored the entire proceeding. He did not draw his eyes away from his radar screen as his crewmates struggled to get the body down the ladder flanking his seat. He did not turn once to look at the corpse as it was stretched out behind him. He remained quietly unconcerned, as if the reality of one touchable body was simpler to handle than the vision of distant millions. That was the opposite reaction from the one predicted by the psychiatrists. They said the unseen millions would be more tolerable than looking death in the eye. Psychic numbing, they called it; a lesson from Vietnam that the shrinks concluded would be far more useful in the big war.

Tyler went about his business, watching his screen, charting and plotting, mouthing bland course corrections to Kazaklis. He was the perfect, efficient, no-nonsense navigator, a tribute to the system. He said nothing more about the super con of the mock destruction of his home and family, nothing more about the hoax of this most elaborate practice mission. Nor did he utter a single word indicating he had changed his mind. He engaged in no small talk with Radnor, his seatmate in the basement. He did his job. That was the beauty of PRP. It worked even when it didn't work.

The presence of O'Toole's body had a much more profound effect on Radnor. He found himself looking over his shoulder regularly at the placid hulk of the man he last had seen in the shower at Fairchild. O'Toole's feet pointed toward Radnor's back, his face hidden just beyond the bulkhead interrupting the radar operator's line of sight toward the hatch door. So Radnor saw two V-angled boots, two legs, and the beginning of a torso. No more. The body was bathed in the plane's red night lights, a routine red that now took on a hue of malevolence for the first time in Radnor's career.

Tyler wasn't helping matters either. Once, as Radnor drew his eyes back away from O'Toole's body, he saw Tyler reach reverently forward and carefully touch the little Kodak icon he had pasted above his radar screen, one finger caressing a cherub's cheek, another seeming to tousle the glossy image of fine blond curls. Radnor could see Tyler speaking softly, a loving incantation to the baby-blue eyes that had filled with tears on the frozen runway such a short time ago. Radnor shuddered. He wanted to scream at Tyler:
Take it down, damn you. Take it down.
Tyler bothered him almost as much as the nearness of O'Toole's dead figure. The whole thing gave him the jitters, conjuring up undesirable thoughts about Spokane, Laura, and the world he had left behind forever. Radnor kept no icon of his own. He didn't need one, Laura's face being riveted into his mind. He sobbed briefly. Then, as trained, he called on PRP to push those thoughts back down. It was not easy. But he was kept quite busy.

Upstairs, Halupalai now occupied the rear of the topside cabin alone. Had it not been for O'Toole's demise, Halupalai would have been the most dangerously exposed to wrong thoughts. He was the one about whom the psychiatrists—had they been perched in some dark corner of the nuclear bomber, watching, watching, as Halupalai's mind often had envisioned them—would have been the most worried. He simply had nothing to do, being the guardian only of the remote-controlled Gatling guns 150 feet behind him in the tail. That left time to think, and thinking truly was dangerous. Kazaklis handled that problem.

“Halupalai?” the pilot asked shortly after the gunner returned upstairs. “You think you can handle O'Toole's tinker toys for us?”

“You bet, commander,” Halupalai responded excitedly, his enthusiasm briefly running away with him. “I've sat next to so many O'Tooles I've forgotten most of their names and faces.” The sergeant immediately felt an overwhelming surge of guilt. He had forgotten many faces, but not O'Toole's, which leaped tauntingly into his mind's eye now. His voice trailed off. “I think I can do it, commander,” he added.

Kazaklis took no heed of the mood change. “Congratulations, lieutenant,” he said. “You may have the first battlefield commission of this here war
...
or whatever the hell we're into.”

Halupalai paused again. “I'll take the job, commander,” he said. “You keep the bars.”

“You sunburned beach bum!” Kazaklis thundered. “Holdin' out for captain on me, huh?”

Halupalai gazed into the blinking red-and-yellow instrument panel in front of him. Fleetingly the roar of the madding crowds echoed again, the adulation of the California girls tickled at his loins, the succession of three wives clung to his arm and then detached, the great green turf bleached into seedy car lots with overpriced Mercedeses. Twenty years ago he turned down a commission, his own quiet acknowledgment that a college degree in off-tackle slants had brought him more grief than gain.

“Holdin' out for sergeant, commander. Don't need the lonely burden and all that.”

Kazaklis chuckled. “You're never gonna get ahead in this world, sarge.” He motioned for Moreau to take the wheel and, with both hands, lifted the cumbersome white helmet off his head, replacing it with a headset. In the pressurized cabin the heavy, hot helmet was necessary only at moments of risk—takeoff, landing, low-level, combat, and, of course, during the raw tension of air-to-air refueling. So Kazaklis placed it now to his left, just behind the innocently obscure red lever that armed the nuclear weapons. The plane had three such levers, one at each crew station. All three had to be pulled to activate the weapons. His hand brushed past the lever as he reached into the side pocket of his flight jacket and extracted a mangled pack of Camels.

“Watch the match,” Kazaklis said automatically as the cupped light flared briefly in the dark cockpit.

“Afraid you'll blind me, commander?” Moreau asked blandly.

Kazaklis drew deeply on the stubby little cigarette, the red-orange ember melding into the safety of the night lights, and tried to ignore her.

“Those things'll kill you, Kazaklis,” Moreau pushed on. She knew Kazaklis always stowed a carton of Camels in his alert bag— along with the candy bars, the first-aid kit, the radio beacon, the .45, the cyanide pill, and other essentials, including Russian rubles and Chinese yuan. She laughed a trifle loudly.

“Think you're funny, huh?” Kazaklis snapped. “That's a real ho-ho, Moreau. Anybody tell you about the union rules when they let you in this outfit? We get a cigarette break. A silent one.”

“Well, well. Little touchy tonight? You were ready every time the siren went off. Remember?”

“Just can it, Moreau.”

“I was laughing about the rubles we've got stuffed in our bags. Great piece of American ingenuity. Nuke 'em and buy your way out.”

“I brought international wampum, Moreau. Camels and Hersheys. What you got to sell, pal? Or should I ask?”

Moreau stiffened. “God damn you, Kazaklis,” she said after a moment. “You really are an asshole.”

Kazaklis sighed, then pulled long and hard on the Camel, its ragged bite diverting the headache throbbing lightly at his temples. His mind darted erratically but calmly through what little he knew of the night's realities. Nuclear weapons, he knew, had been used in anger or error for the first time since Nagasaki. He knew Spokane was gone. He presumed Seattle was gone for the simple reason that he had picked up no air-traffic calls as he had moved past the fringe of the city's commercial landing patterns. He knew part of his boyhood home, Oregon being a state without strategic targets, was at least functioning and might be for some time, panic aside, because the prevailing westerlies would keep it out of the normal fallout pattern for days. But the frozen subarctic wastes over which he was flying revealed little more. The President could be alive and frantically negotiating. He could be dead. Hell, he could have started it and be orbiting in the National Emergency Airborne Command Post. The
E-4.
“The Flying Fuehrer Bunker,”
Rolling Stone
had called it years ago, and the name had stuck in the black, barroom humor of the bomber pilots.

“Achtung!” Kazaklis snorted.

Moreau looked at him strangely, but his gaze held hard and blankly on the flash curtain.

The
Looking Glass
plane, the flying SAC command post, almost surely was flying. Kazaklis had no illusions about the latest political fad of limited nuclear wars. So he assumed what had happened in Seattle and Spokane had happened all over the United States. Still, the
Looking Glass
had to be flying. Not a moment had passed in more than two decades without a command post aloft over the Midwest, ready to take control when the land bases went. It was possible the
E-4's,
the President's giant command plane at Andrews and the carbon-copy aircraft at Offutt in Omaha, were caught on the ground. It was almost impossible to take out the
Looking Glass.
It had been airborne and he should hear from it. Soon. But his more immediate worry was the refueling planes, not one of which had made it away from Fairchild. An alternate could be waiting for them, out of Eielson in Alaska or perhaps Minot in North Dakota. But the radio hadn't peeped. Without a refueling rendezvous, they had enough fuel to get in but not out. Moreau's little joke about the rubles, his about her pretty fanny, wasn't so funny.

Kazaklis grunted unintelligibly.

Moreau stared straight ahead, ignoring him this time.

Even the refueling problem was irrelevant. Of all the grand theories that had failed tonight, Kazaklis knew that he and the four others in
Polar Bear One
now were about to test the most dubious theory of all. That a thirty-year-old B-52 could somehow worm its way unseen into the heart of Russia and get out again. He knew the odds on that one—one hundred to one at best. This night, his throbbing skull told him, was not at best. He already had one dead crewman and another who was psyched into a jack-off world all his own. He could only guess about refueling tankers and communications. Of the six Buffs on alert at Fairchild, his was the only one still flying. That meant, he was sure, that of the hundred Buffs on alert tonight, maybe twenty were in the air. And that meant four thousand SAM missiles, plus countless fighter-interceptors, could pick away at twenty SAC bombers. The PRP psychiatrists would work him over good for that thought. The intercontinental missiles, they would counsel reassuringly, already had destroyed almost all the SAM bases. That's what they're for. Sure thing. So now we get to wander through fifteen hundred miles of radioactive fallout. The shrinks never answered that one. Are you afraid? they asked instead. No, Kazaklis was not afraid. But PRP had not freeze-dried his psyche to the point where he had any illusions. He knew, as all the bomber pilots knew, that once it went, it went. He knew that, for God and country, he now was a rational suicide. Contrary to the public's vision of nuclear war—one poof and it's all over—he now faced a ten-hour drone into Russia with sheer boredom and raw tension alternately ripping at frayed nerves and eating at trained minds, one threatening to drive them all nuts if the other didn't. His chore, as commander, was to hold them all together while they rationally committed suicide.