Trinity's Child (30 page)

“That is the system, sir.” Harpoon swore under his breath. He was sounding like a damned New England schoolmaster. But he didn't know how else to answer.

The successor's eyes darted past Harpoon to the map of the Soviet Union. Across the top of the Eurasian continent, the same mix of red and blue dotted the landmass. He had fewer reference points in a land he had never visited, but the middle of the continent, from east to west along the Trans-Siberian Railway line, was a long red string where the main missile fields had been. Red starbursts blossomed out of Kamchatka and the Arctic coast near Murmansk, which he assumed were submarine bases. He knew from Cabinet meetings that Plesetsk and Tyuratam were missile-and satellite-launching centers. They were red. So were Vladivostok and Odessa, as promised, as well as Sverdlovsk, Tbilisi, and a handful of other major Soviet cities. Moscow was dotted in red, but blue interrupted the blood color. Leningrad, Minsk, Smolensk, Riga, and other metropolitan areas remained blue.

The successor moved his eyes away from the map and toward Harpoon. Shakily, he started to rise, clattering the Seal to the floor. He sat back down. His face was ghostly white and his mouth moved several times before the words came out. “Treason . . .” he muttered grotesquely. “Ungodly . . . insane . . .” The words trailed off.

Harpoon felt the plane tilt slightly as the pilot maneuvered in the random pattern of evasion he had been taught. Around the briefing table, the officers swayed with the aircraft, eyes cast downward, light coughs interrupting the rhythmic silence of the moment. Only the colonel, outranked by all but here because he was the command plane's expert in Soviet thinking, nodded almost imperceptibly.

Harpoon floundered. He looked at his watch. Damn. “Insane, perhaps,” he said wearily. “Ungodly, for sure. But not treason. It is the system we built to protect ourselves. It is the system the Soviets built to protect themselves.” He paused very briefly. “It isn't working very well.”

“Isn't working very well,” the successor repeated in a drone. His mind was weaving with the aircraft. “Loco,” he said, the word momentarily jelling his thoughts. He spat the next words: “We runnin' this war from some ward at St. Elizabeth's, Harpoon?”

Harpoon sagged, then drew himself up again. “Sir,” he said plaintively, “it is crucial that you quickly learn the system so you have some chance of dealing with it. If all of America is destroyed, the Soviets have no hostages and we have nothing to protect. The Soviets don't want that. If all the Soviet Union is destroyed, we have no hostages and they have nothing to protect. We can't possibly want that. Then there is no
reason
to stop. Ever.”

“Stop,” the successor repeated.

Harpoon watched the man closely. He had watched men go crazy dealing with this in peacetime.

“Who started this, Harpoon?” he asked.

Damn. There's no time for this crap. “The Soviets, sir.”

“How long ago?”

“Four hours. Almost precisely 0600 Zulu.” Harpoon felt his fears turn to exasperation. “That's Greenwich mean time, sir. One
A.M
. in Washington. Midnight in Omaha.”

“Winter morning in Moscow. Dark.” The successor's words were detached. “Out of darkness. Into darkness.” His eyes drifted into the gloom of the briefing compartment. His mind drifted, too.

Now Harpoon felt woozy. Out of darkness, into darkness? Was he quoting from the Bible? He struggled through misty childhood memories of Revelation and Matthew and John. He shook his head.

“Wintertime,” the colonel intoned seriously. “A time when the Russian psyche is its darkest, its most depressed, its most paranoid. They are so preoccupied with the cold darkness of their long winters that Russian authors have written novels about the theft of an overcoat. Tells you a lot.” Harpoon looked at him in amazement. The colonel paused and then intoned seriously, “It also tells us that if those people were paranoid enough to start this, they are paranoid enough to go down to the last missile.”

The admiral stared at the Librarian. You little prick. Spent your whole life burrowing through Russian papers looking for the most belligerent statements to use as ammunition. Then Harpoon cursed himself again. They had all used men like that, kept them around to pry more money out of Congress. Just as the Russians had kept men busy collecting the rashest of the American statements, crap from the John Birch Society, nutty statements from half-baked right-wing congressmen with no more influence than Jerry Falwell.
Damn.
Harpoon continued to stare at the colonel, but he wasn't sure whom he was damning most. The colonel stared back.

Harpoon shook his head once more and turned toward the successor. The man's face was gone again. He felt like he was wrestling with Jell-O. Harpoon tried to fight down the wisp of a memory, the kind he had successfully suppressed during the total involvement of the past four hours. His eleven-year-old grandson pulled at his sleeve, tugging him back into playfulness after one of those periodic lapses far off into his SIOP world. Earth to Gramps, the boy said. Come in, Cramps. The admiral's grandson had been in Seattle. He winced. The admiral fought back the memory. Earth to the President. “Sir, can we please get on with this?”

The successor saw the wince. “I see no point,” he said.

“No point?”

“I want our remaining ICBM's fired at the blue circles immediately.”

“Sir, please . . .”

Even the colonel was shaking his head now, and a pang of fear flashed through Harpoon. The Librarian had no respect for this man at all. For years the colonel had been the used. Now he was going to be the user.

“Fire them,” the successor said.

“All our ICBM's were launched or destroyed hours ago,” Harpoon fumbled.

“Why don't you just get to the point, admiral?” The colonel cut in.

“Because he needs to know what is at stake, dammit!” Harpoon flared.

“At stake?” the colonel bored on. “We were attacked. The sovereignty of the United States is at stake. We can give up, or we can use the bombers. To cut the head off the chicken.”

“Shut up, colonel,” Harpoon said flatly. They were talking as if the successor had left the compartment. But the successor was not listening anyway, tracking on his own course now.

“Precisely how many Americans are dead?” the man interrupted.

“Twenty to thirty million,” Harpoon said, swiveling his glare away from the colonel and into the blank face. “More will die from radiation, riots, disorder. Maybe forty million total. If we can stop now.”

“Russians?”

“Fifteen, twenty million. Maybe thirty million with the side effects. If we can stop.”

“So we have lost.”

Harpoon sagged in despair. “Sir,” he said desolately, “this isn't victory by body count. Can't you understand? It isn't over, for God's sake. Our bombers are under way for a second strike. Our submarines have been given predetermined orders for a third strike. We can't talk to our submarines. We can't talk to the Russians. Between us we have more than forty thousand warheads left. We don't know how to stop it.” He slumped further, feeling trapped and helpless. “It isn't over,” he repeated hauntedly. “It's out of control.”

“Eighty miles,” Radnor's voice droned into the cockpit. “Seventy.”

“Foxbat!” Kazaklis demanded the specs on their adversaries.

“Top speed, Mach two-point-eight,” Moreau replied. “Range fifteen hundred miles. One way. Toughest in high-altitude dogfights. Most sophisticated—”

“Armaments?” Kazaklis interrupted. He knew the Foxbat was sophisticated—maybe too sophisticated—and he already had begun calculating that to his advantage, the tortoise plotting against the hare. The fighters were three minutes away. If they missed on this run—and they could, because they were approaching too fast—their speed would take them on a long looping turn, giving him invaluable time.

“Four AA-6 ACRID air-to-air missiles,” Moreau replied immediately. “Warheads nonnuclear. Heat-seekers, range fifty miles.

Radar-guided, range twenty miles. They'll try 'em both ways. Gun pack, two twenty-three-millimeter machine guns.”

“Sixty miles.”

“Evasive action,” Kazaklis ordered. His words were distant now, as if they were trailing several moves behind his mind. “Close air intakes. Hokay, buddies, let's see how the cossacks like their eggs fried in their own grease.”

Moreau began the swaying, groaning maneuver back into the radioactive cloud. “Fifty miles,” Radnor said. “Forty miles. Missiles launched! One. Two . . .” He paused. “Six launches!”

“Decoys out!”

“Decoys dispatched.” Halupalai instinctively placed his hand on the Gatling-gun trigger, the Vietnam reflex, and then pulled it back.

“Thirty miles.”

“Clouds?” Kazaklis wanted the red crud badly, not only because it would spook the racing MIG pilots but more importantly because the dancing radioactivity might clutter the missile guidance systems.

Downstairs, Radnor stared at his radar. He saw six little blips racing at him, four larger ones swooping ahead of the missiles and climbing. From the other direction the fog was creeping slowly across his screen, nearing the center. “Twenty degrees left,” he said. “Countdown?”

“No time,” Kazaklis barked. “Twenty degrees left,” he repeated.

Moreau reacted. Radnor interrupted. “Bandits twenty miles. They're climbing, commander.”

“Yeah, they screwed up. They were up our gazoom before they saw us. They're trying to eat speed.”

The pilot's voice crackled with tension. But it also carried the slightest touch of satisfaction. He knew that a B-52, once it was found, could be shot down by almost anything that flew. He needed every edge he could get.

The successor had gone silent again. Harpoon peered out at him. He seemed in a daze, so lost and alone. A wave of sympathy flooded through Harpoon, then departed swiftly. He felt alone too, grappling with forces careening out of his control. Suddenly, in the faint light, Harpoon thought he saw in the phallic shadow of the Secret Service agent's gun barrel what Icarus must have seen in the projection of Soviet missiles arching down on him in
Omaha.
The thought startled
him.
The pressure was getting to him. Then he saw Icarus sending him away—Godspeed, God grace. He saw the unfrightened face of his young escort turn toward a last gin-rummy game, the vaulted doors sealed below him. He saw the rockets' red glare of a long-ago Fourth of July, the future stretched limitlessly beneath him in the monumental splendor of his nation's capital, and he heard his bride whisper,
Never say good-bye.
And he pulled himself together, signaled the projectionist to bring up the third map, and decided to plod on, his way.

“Sir,” Harpoon said, “you should briefly examine how other nations reacted.” The successor said nothing. Harpoon flashed a wobbling light on the world. “Most of the less-developed nuclear powers responded reflexively. So did Israel. Only Britain and France held off.”

“Our allies,” the successor said, his voice still vacant and hollow.

Harpoon ignored him, wanting to hurry through this part. “The Soviets made no move against Western Europe, moved no troops and launched no weapons. Nor did they move against the Middle East, although the Israelis did. The Israelis always have sought buffer zones—the kind they tried to create in the Sinai, the Golan Heights, Lebanon. They also tend to move when the rest of the world is preoccupied. We were very preoccupied.” He took a deep breath and added: “They created a rather large buffer zone.”

Harpoon's pointer moved quickly through the Middle East. The red splashed erratically. In Syria, Damascus was red, as was Amman in Jordan, Baghdad in Iraq, Tehran and other targets in Iran. Splotches dotted the region of the world's first civilization along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers and through the biblical regions to the edge of Jerusalem and the Dead Sea. The destruction leaped over Egypt to the west but continued along the Mediterranean through Libya. Harpoon's pointer quickly moved back over the Persian Gulf to the Indian subcontinent.

“Others acted completely irrationally.” The pointer skirted past red starbursts in Pakistan and India. “Apparently a defective Chinese missile, aimed at Soviet Central Asia, landed in northern Pakistan near the capital of Islamabad. The Paks thought it came from India. They hit New Delhi with the few crude weapons they had. India responded, also with crude weapons, hitting both Islamabad and Karachi.”

The successor groped through the maps, his mind inundated, his instincts telling him to take control. Somehow. He remembered the concern about Pakistan when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. “Sounds like a Soviet conspiracy to me,” he blurted. “They always wanted Pakistan.”

Harpoon stumbled to a stop. The colonel broke in. “The President has a point, admiral. The Soviets always wanted a warm-water port. Taking Pakistan gives them one.”

Harpoon felt like laughing. But he knew the colonel was starting his play for the man. “What in God's name would the Soviets do with a warm-water port after this?” he asked.

“Straight down the Indus River to the Arabian Sea,” the successor said with new enthusiasm. Let them know you understand strategic thinking too.

“Nothing,” the colonel said smugly. “If we stop them.”