Trinity's Child (23 page)

“Not to the Russians,” he continued, “although this administration scares the be-Jeezuz out of me. Driving the Russians to the wall, where they're most likely to lash out. But that isn't it. We're all losing. We're losing to the bomb. It's become too big, too pervasive, too matter-of-fact and ingrained. We're failing, Mo. And you and I are the pawns. We always have been.”

Moreau stiffened.

“I don't believe this. Not from you. Remember the ten-year-old kid you took to the Trinity site? Remember the lieutenant and his haunted scientists? Come on, Dad. Eternal vigilance. What's the alternative? You said it yourself: the danger is in losing faith in ourselves.”

“Remember the initials at the McDonald ranch?” he asked.

“G. J. Loves J. J.,” Moreau answered noncommittally.

“The random event. Two kids who walked unseen past hundreds of Army guards, climbed over a six-foot fence past trip wires and sensors, crossed miles and miles of desert, probably with missile tests all around them. Two unknown kids we'll never know. Into that room, not even knowing what it was. Probably had a six-pack of beer and screwed their eyes out. Carved their initials in Oppenheimer's wall and then walked back out again. The random, unlikely, impossible event. Part of the human cycle. And it's going to get us. We're going to lose.”

“I don't buy that,” she said stiffly. “We made it through your life, while you carried the torch. We'll make it through mine. And then the next. Just like you said. We're like dry alcoholics, Dad. We can't afford to fail. They take it one day at a time. We'll take it one life, one generation at a time. Now it's my turn.”

“There's a big difference, Mo, and you know it.”

“No, I don't know it,” she replied angrily.

“Dry alcoholics fail all the time, Mo, and it's one poor soul's sad tragedy. He doesn't take all of AA with him.”

“So what's your answer, Dr. Oppenheimer?” Moreau asked hostilely.

“I don't have one, dearest daughter,” he said sadly. “I simply know I was wrong, that nothing goes on forever. I simply know that I want you to get rid of those gray phalluses you pack around with you and find one life-giving one of your own. I want you to settle down and try to find, for as long as you can, what I never was able to give your mother.”

Moreau stared into the fire. She had not known, until she began college, that her mother had committed suicide.

“Sorry, Dad,” she said. “It's a little late.”

“Very late,” he said.

Moreau's arms felt numb from her fingernails back over the top of her shoulder blades. In front of her the yellow dials of the instrument panel wobbled like birthday candles and she flexed and unflexed her jaw muscles to keep her eye in focus. Her head throbbed violently. She had not turned since the conversation stopped. How long, in God's name, had it been?

Across from her Kazaklis could feel the water, a mix of sweat and eye-ache tears, flood under his visor, down over his oxygen mask, and drip into his lap.
Elsie's
contrails blurred in the visor fog and he brushed at the protective plastic shell fruitlessly. In frustration he wrenched the visor back up inside his helmet, mopped at the wetness with his glove, and sorted out the four jet streams again. He glanced quickly at his watch. 0903 Zulu. Eleven minutes. Jesus. How the hell had Moreau held the plane that long? It was like being on the rack. Minutes were hours. They had taken less fuel than he would like, more than he had expected. But this was moving beyond both physical and psychological tolerances. And it had to be worse above them in the tanker. The percentages were turning. Fast.
“Elsie!”
he rasped. “You wanta break it off? Maybe you can ride the fumes down to the lake.”

“Negative. We're gonna play it out. Might be the gallon that gets you to Paris, pal.” The tanker pilot's voice sounded as tight as an overtuned violin.

Kazaklis turned to Moreau. “How you doing, copilot?”

“I'll make it. Keep your eyes on the road.” She didn't sound any better. Kazaklis was worried. They were taking this too far.

“Thanks for the juice,
Elsie,”
he radioed. “You did great. It's time to do it the easy way.”

“Hang in there, commander.”
Elsie's
voice was tinny again. “You'll thank me later.”

Kazaklis felt the slightest shudder, saw a dark puff from the tanker's number-four engine, and then just three contrails.

“Now!”
he screamed.
“Breakaway!”

“Breakaway!” Elsie
shouted in panicky unison.
“Breakaway! Breakaway!”

Two contrails. One contrail. The tanker wobbled precariously.

Moreau heard a violent scraping behind her, then a tremendous clanging crash at her side. She turned instinctively right and saw the ugly head of the refueling probe bounce away from the metal window strut near her ear and then scratch slowly across the Plexiglas.
No sparks!
her mind shrieked; oh, God,
no sparks!

Down!
She could hear Kazaklis yelling, ghostlike, far, far away.
Down! Take her down!
But she already had begun to take the B-52 down. Fast. At the first scream she had automatically nosed the plane into a dangerously deep dive. Her ears were ringing.
Down!
The yellow Master Alarm light glared angrily at her. Out the window she could see
Elsie
pulling in the probe. One engine still sputtered. But the tanker slowly settled back on them, the leading edge of the tail section barely above their cockpit.

“Elsie,
get your nose down!” Kazaklis shouted. “Your tail's on top of us!”

Slowly the tanker's nose eased over, the tail came up, and
Elsie
slid into a shallow dive. For one long, agonizing moment the two aircraft moved in almost parallel dives, no more than one hundred feet apart, and Moreau stared horrified into the winking red beacon in the tanker's belly.

“It isn't going to work,
Elsie,”
Kazaklis said in a low, haunted message to the tanker.

Silently, as if on orders,
Elsie's
right wingtip arched up. And then she spun, like a fighter plane, wingtip over wingtip, to the left and out of Moreau's sight. The copilot felt the B-52 shake as the tanker's tail scrambled the air currents in front of the bomber's left wing. Then Moreau slowly began to pull their plane level.

“Jump, damn you!” Kazaklis said in a final plaintive order.

“They can't, commander,” Moreau said quietly.

“No,” Kazaklis replied.

“They knew that.”

“Yes.”

Kazaklis reached over and pulled the curtain again, shutting out the world.

Below, in the navigation quarters, Tyler watched his screen in silent fascination. The tiny image swirled downward like a dead mosquito. Then it appeared to strike the ground. Poof! Damnedest thing. It seemed so real. He looked up from his screen with a troubled, puzzled expression. It had seemed
too
real.

Radnor could feel the eyes turn toward him, but he refused to look back at his crewmate. Up the stairs, in the rear of the topside cabin, Halupalai slowly released his hands from an ejection lever turned clammy wet. He swiveled his head and looked into the forward cabin. The vacant redness enveloped Kazaklis and Moreau again, the night sky gone, and all Halupalai could see was the back of two white helmets trained, straight ahead, on the closed curtain.

In the cockpit, not a word was exchanged for minutes. Kazaklis had retaken the controls and Moreau tried to will some vitality back into her lifeless arms, some sense into her benumbed head.

“Nice job,” Kazaklis said to her, his monotone barely discernible.

Moreau did not respond immediately. “Do you think you could have done that?” she asked.

Kazaklis paused too. Their words seemed to be lobbing back and forth like tennis balls caught on a stop-action viewer. “I suppose so.”

“What
Elsie
did.”

“I know.”

“Took guts.”

“Guess so.”

“Guess so?”

“Don't really know what it takes, do we? Life comes along and hands us one and we react.”

Moreau slumped in exhausted exasperation. She had neither the heart nor the energy for anger. “You guess so,” she said with lifeless weariness. “Life comes along. You react. How can you write those people off that way? What does life mean to you, Kazaklis? Do you even think about it?”

His words came back without emotion. “Life's a game, Moreau,” he said. “A game you play the best you can.”

“Good God,” she murmured. “A game. And what if you lose?”

“You tell yourself you were playing the Yankees,” he said blankly.

The silence went tomblike. A long while later, Kazaklis glanced sideways at Moreau. She sat stiffly in her seat. He wondered which of them was better off now, although that was a matter of very small degree. Was she, this strange woman, his chance partner who had believed in something and had it all come apart? Was he, who had believed in nothing and had it all come true? He glanced at his watch and saw it was past one
a.m
. in Oregon, these not being Zulu-time thoughts. His old man would be up in a couple of hours, lacing the morning coffee with the usual Jim Beam and heading into the same eternal woods as if this were just another day, with the fallout, if it had reached the Coos this soon, being just more hay-fever pollen. He saw Sarah Jean . . . and the contrails flick away one by one. Briefly he wondered if this abrasive, perplexing woman sitting next to him was as fraudulent in her life cover as he was in his. He snorted quickly, inhaling the thought and the tears, and radioed downstairs, asking for a fix on their Positive Control Point, the last stop sign the Air Force left for them before the plunge low over Russian tundra.

Far behind
Polar Bear One,
on the ground in the damp drizzle of the woods of Louisiana, a man in jeans, a yellow chamois shirt, and a down vest watched a group of shadowy figures approach him. He knelt nervously behind a soggy fallen tree, holding a double-barreled shotgun trained on the newcomers. He had used the gun in the past hour. Life had been a bizarre and unexplainable hell since the far-off but near-blinding midnight flashes during this damnable camping trip. Since then, people had gone crazy, and the man had defended himself.

Through the murk, he saw the group of men carefully advancing on him. They held small sawed-off weapons, and the man shivered. He shakily pointed the shotgun at the first shadow and fired. He heard a grunt and the shadow fell. The other shadows faded into the protective cover of the woods. Suddenly the woods thundered with the fire of automatic weapons and the branches splintered above him. He cowered deeper into the semiprotection of the log.

“I'm a federal Cabinet officer!” he shouted, cursing himself for a voice that sounded squeaky with fear.

“Throw your weapon out,” a disembodied voice responded.

He paused uncertainly.

The woods thundered again and the spray of wood chips showered him again, closer this time.

“Secret Service!” the disembodied voice said. “Throw your weapon out. Now.”

The man looped his shotgun up over the log, but kept himself protected. He heard crunching footsteps nearing and looked up to see men in bloodied business suits pointing stubby gray sub-machineguns at him. “Identification,” one said curtly. He reached for his wallet. “Hold it!” the voice commanded. “I'll get it.” The figure reached over and extracted the wallet, examining it carefully. The man in the jeans heard a sigh of relief from above him. “The Condor is caged,” the figure said over his shoulder to the others, and the weapons were lowered.

The leader of the Secret Service agents beckoned to a man who did not seem to belong with the group. He was short, fat, and carried a small black book. “Do your thing, judge,” the agent said, “and do it fast.”

The ceremony was over in seconds, the man in the jeans so woozy he was not sure what he had pledged to do. Then the lead agent took him by the arm. “Mr. Secretary . . . Mr. President . . . we have to get you out of here in one helluva hurry.”

Hundreds of miles to the northeast, in an inky blackness somewhere in Maryland, Sedgwick opened his eyes slowly and painfully. It took him a moment to adjust to the near-total darkness. As his eyes focused, he first saw the jagged, twisted metal of the rear section of
Nighthawk One.
It appeared to have been sheared off only a few feet in front of his seat, and the rest of the chopper was nowhere to be seen. He panicked and turned abruptly to look at the passenger next to him, a sudden surge of pain causing him to faint again. After a moment, his wits seeped back. He turned more slowly this time, saw his companion hunched forward exactly as he had been when the chopper started down. He reached over and grasped the man's wrist, seeking a pulse. At first, in his grogginess, he missed it. Then he felt a slight but distinct pump . . . pump . . . pump.

“They got the fuel, general.”

“Enough?”