Trinity's Child (24 page)

“Marginal.”

“And the tanker?”

“Crashed. Near Great Bear.”

In the
Looking Glass,
Alice turned away, squeezing the major's shoulder. He glanced at the row of clocks on the far cabin wall, his eyes quickly passing Moscow time and Washington time and Omaha time. Zulu time read 0930, three and a half hours after the first exchange. Since the conversation with Harpoon, more of their communications had come back up. But not nearly enough. He moved across the narrow aisle to another member of his battle staff.

“Your boys?”

“One of 'em got a few minutes from a tanker out of Thule.”

“The tanker?”

“Down in Baffin Bay.”

“And your other Buff?”

“The tanker out of Goose Bay is still chasing him. Don't particularly want the B-52 to slow down. Looks like they'll rendezvous near the east coast of Greenland, north of Iceland. It's hairy.”

“Yes.” Alice's voice was tired and he turned toward his old friend for the summary. “So what do we have, Sam?”

“Less than fifteen still flying, sir. Half of 'em refueled. Three or four more will get the fuel. The rest will have to go in with what they have.”

“Did the FB-111 make it in?”

Sam looked at Alice strangely. They had made a guinea pig out of the supersonic fighter-bomber, sending him in too fast to probe the Soviet defenses for the B-52's. “That wasn't a fair test, general.”

Alice said nothing. Fair. Damn you, Sam. That's why we've got generals and that's why we've got colonels.

“He never was meant to fly supersonically all the way,” Sam continued. “Little spurts, yeah, for evasion and the final run, sure. Not all the way. He was slurping gas like a Ferrari.”

Alice still said nothing.

“At Mach two-point-five, eighteen hundred mother-humpin' miles an hour, he damn near got there. He launched the new cruise missiles off Hope Island, made it through the Soviet perimeter, and did a helluva job evading the MIG's over the Barents Sea.”

Alice stared vacantly past the colonel at his communications officer, a short, stocky woman perspiring as she still worked frantically to patch together the tools of their control. He couldn't remember her first name. Why did men want to mate when their world, little world or big world, seemed terminal?

“He was approaching the coast of Finland, west of Murmansk, on a straight shot at Leningrad. He was running out of fuel. It was slow down or flame out. He slowed down. We think a MIG rammed him.”

Alice turned back toward Sam. “So what did we learn?” he asked.

“We learned that, coming straight in, there still are enough MIG's to stop an armada. We can surmise that some of our electronic-warfare gear, the jamming equipment or the chaff or something, worked better than expected or the MIG wouldn't have needed to ram him. We learned the cruise doesn't work. At least in this environment.”

The general's entire frame seemed to sag. “Eggheads,” he said wearily. “Remember all those four-hundred-dollar suits and alligator briefcases parading into the Pentagon from Seattle and fort Worth and Long Island? Christ, some of their slide shows would have put Coppola to shame. Bright little farts, weren't they?”

“It was a great theory, sir. A fifteen-hundred mile cruise missile, launched offshore from a bomber, its computer memory following maps of riverbeds, mountains, bridges, television transmitters. Error probability ninety feet. Aim at home plate and you won't miss by more than first base. Terrain trackers. Somebody forgot the first whomp would change the terrain.”

“So what do we have?”

“With the cruise launches from the FB-111? They're going bananas. Running around in circles. Hitting mountains. Nosing into the tundra. One of 'em is heading for Stockholm. It's only four hundred miles off target. Don't guess we'll get the Peace Prize for that one.” The colonel looked at Alice. “It means the B-52's will have to go all the way in. Use the gravity bombs.”

The general turned away and stared up the aisle of the command post. His staff had done a remarkable job, considering the damage done to both the hardware and the outside atmosphere needed for men to communicate. Of the forty-three different communications systems he normally had at his command, three or four were working intermittently. Only one seemed to be working consistently—the ultra-low-frequency system operating through a five-mile-long copper-wire antenna trailing out of the back of the airplane like a fishing line. He always figured that one would be the survivor. Unfortunately, it had its limitations. The frequency was so low and so slow, he could tap out no more than a few words a minute. On a teletype.

Still, the early chaos had settled down to an eerie routine aboard the
Looking Glass.
He could sense a bizarre fascination among his people as they slowly gathered data about what had worked and what hadn't, what had survived and what hadn't. From the
Looking Glass,
the general thought ruefully, he had at least a blurred view into the new world he had temporarily inherited. He had already decided he didn't want his inheritance or the responsibility for the next steps. He moved forward where the colonel was scrolling—Christ, they had him
thinking
computer talk—through tracking maps.

“Sam,” he said, “what the hell is going on with Harpoon?”

“Beats me, sir,” the colonel replied. “I think he's getting ready to put down in Baton Rouge. That's where the man is supposed to be, if everything worked right on the ground. God, it's high-risk. First of all, there are mobs all over every surviving airport in the country.”

“Troops deployed?”

“Several battalions.”

“But it's the other opposition that worries you?”

“Hell, yes. Nothing visible. But we can't see beneath the Gulf of Mexico.”

The general stared into the screen. “Pull me on the Buff, Sam,” he said.

“Polar Bear?”

“Yes.”

The screen flicked through a maze of fluttering projections and then settled on a map that boxed part of Alaska, the northernmost reaches of Canada, and the edge of Victoria Island. A small white cursor stood stationary just millimeters shy of the edge of the continent and the beginning of the Beaufort Sea and then the Arctic Ocean. The cursor edged forward, as the computer adjusted to the plane's flight path, and then stopped again. The B-52 was almost on top of its PCP, the Positive Control Point at which the bomber required further orders from Alice before making the ultimate commitment to go in.

“Do you want to call them, sir?” the colonel asked.

“No!” the general replied in a voice so stern he startled himself. “Goddammit! No!”

The drone of the eight straining engines went unheard by the five people inside
Polar Bear One,
the din of their own silence overwhelming the mechanical noise. Only Radnor broke the quiet. “Request permission to leave station, sir,” he radioed upstairs. Good God damn, Kazaklis thought. This is the second time in ten minutes Radnor, whose bladder had held through twelve-hour practice missions, had asked to come up to use the head. “Granted,” the pilot grunted. Kazaklis understood what this was. The tension of the rendezvous with
Elsie
had given way now to a dull, nagging anxiety that crept slowly down the spine and then bored inward to settle, like an ulcer, in the stomach. With Radnor, it seemed, the anxiety was settling a little lower. Where the hell was the
Looking Glass?
The waiting was worse than the action.

Omaha Beach syndrome, the PRP psychiatrists hot-wired into the pilot's brain. Your crew is over the side now, commander. Cut away from mother, cut away from their world, their safe ship. Off in a bobbing ocean limbo between a reality understood but left behind and a new reality they can't comprehend. Don't want to comprehend. The beach, commander, the alien beach. Make it real for them, commander. Limbo is dangerous.

Fuck off. Wire your postmortem crap into somebody else's head. Game's over.

Aha, commander. Can't handle the end of the world? What does the end of the world mean to you, commander? A father, a mother, a girlfriend? A childhood lake where the rainbow bit, leaped, dived, and fought young hands? A fire in the rain? Those misty Oregon woods where child's eyes saw pterodactyls swoop on webbed wings and older eyes see them swooping again? Is that your lost world, your new world, perhaps? Pterodactyls swooping again? Have you lost a song? A dream? A memory? You can keep the memory, commander. But memories are dangerous now, devil children of the mind. Revenge is safer.

Kazaklis pulled at the lumbering airplane. The Buff seemed to struggle against him, a friend no more, its wings no longer his wings. He prodded it higher, through 40,000 feet, then 45,000 feet into the rare, thin reaches of the stratosphere where each pound of fuel would yield a few more miles. But the drag of the SRAM missiles, tucked under each wing, tugged against him. The weight of
Elsie
's last precious gift rebelled against him. He was a behemoth now, a half-million pounds of gas and weapons and machines and flesh and blood and minds and memories and one useless body blissfully immune to the PRP threats of fathers and mothers and lovers and dreams and songs and lost lakes of a world gone.
Careful, commander.
The aircraft's sluggish.
Who's sluggish, commander?
Weighted down.
Omaha Beach syndrome, commander.
Fuck off.
You're over the side too, commander.
An old girlfriend. Thanks, mind invader. How are you, Sarah Jean? Are you at all, Sarah Jean? Kazaklis shook his head. Go away, girl-image. Gone-image. But seventeen-year-old blond curls tumbled past milky cheeks, over soft shoulders, down around firm breasts hidden, forbidden, beneath a pompon sweater.
Coos Bay! Rah! Rah!
Got yerself a little blond poon, has ya, bub? Shut up, Pa. Best get the poon, bub, cuz that's all yer gonna get from that one; mite too fancy, that one. Pa said you were too fancy, Sarah Jean. Halupalai was driving Kazaklis nuts.

“Goddammit, gunner, go back and sit down!”

The Hawaiian, bending over the telegraph machine behind the pilot's seat, jerked upright at the unexpected violence in the words.

“You're pacing up and down like a goddamn expectant father,” Kazaklis spat.

“Just looking for the message, sir,” Halupalai said defensively.

“We oughta have the message by now. We only got two hundred miles to go.”

Kazaklis let his shoulders droop. The waiting was driving them all crackers. Where was the
Looking Glass?
Where was the message giving them passage through their control point, confirming their targets, revealing the codes to arm weapons? Halupalai, assigned the job of decoding the instructions, had been moving back and forth between his seat and the telegraph since the refueling. Kazaklis suddenly felt guilty. He didn't like blowing at Halupalai. Nobody liked getting angry with Halupalai.

“Hang tough, Pops,” he said soothingly. “Go on back and sit down. The doc will be out soon enough. And he'll tell you it's a boy.”

Halupalai slouched back toward his rear seat.

“It's a boy,” Moreau mused, “a goddamn boy.”

Kazaklis bristled again. “Don't tell me you're gonna start the Gloria Steinem shit. Not now.”

“Settle down, commander,” Moreau said evenly. “Little jumpy, aren't we? History was getting the better of me. Not penis envy. After they tested the first bomb at Trinity, they sent Truman a coded telegram in Potsdam. Just like the one we're waiting for. 'It's a boy,' the message said. 'It's a girl' meant the bomb was a dud.”

“Thanks for the history lesson,” Kazaklis said sullenly. “Maybe ours will say 'It's a person.' Then we can guess.”

Moreau didn't reply at first. It's a girl, Harry. Sorry, Mr. President, a bomb without a cock. No blow-jobs for the Japs. No phallic club to hold over Uncle Joe Stalin. No need for strategic penetrators plunging into Mother Russia. No need for the big hard ones buried in the womb of America's prairies. Man's ultimate failure, Mr. President. It's a girl.

“No,” she finally said. “Ours will be a boy too, Kazaklis.”

“Yeah.”

“You ever wonder where we'd be if it had been a girl, that first one?”

“Still fightin' the Japs door to door.”

“Come off it.”

“Omaha Beach syndrome.”

“You okay?”

“We need to do a little mission planning.”

“We don't even have a mission.”

“Mission planning!”

Very shrewd, commander. Now you're being the commander, commander. Keep them busy while they're in the landing boat. Keep yourself busy.

“Okay, heroes, we're gonna do a run-through on Irkutsk,” Kazaklis heard himself say to all crew stations.

Downstairs, Tyler turned toward Radnor. “Jesus Christ, Kazaklis is really something. Mission planning. To Irkutsk. Jesus. Guess that's why they think he's such a hotshot. He takes everything so serious.”

Radnor turned his head away. His stomach gnawed. Please be quiet, Tyler.

“Not me. Tell you that, Radnor. I'll never take this stuff so serious. This is a stepping-stone for me. I'm getting out as soon as I can. Use the Air Force, that's what I say. Let 'em get you that master's degree and get back outside to a nice quiet, sane life quick. That's what I'm doing. No more war games for me. No sir-ree.”