Trinity's Child (34 page)

“Jericho?”

“Sorry. Jericho is code for a full-scale nuclear war. When we looked at Jericho, we knew communications would go. We knew leaders would die. We saw a system that could be out of control in minutes. So we built in pauses. To some degree, we even matched the equipment to the pauses. The bombers are very slow, which built a natural pause into the war. We are in that pause. Nearing the end of it, though.”

“And the pause was designed by these brightest men,” the successor said, derision in his words, “to do precisely what?”

“To give us time to patch our communications, sir. And to give you and your Soviet counterpart time to stop bluffing and make the Jericho decision.”

Off to the side, Harpoon saw the colonel rise abruptly out of his seat, wagging his head frantically.

“The chicken!” he shouted. “Tell him about cutting the head off the chicken or you'll . . . you'll be remembered with Aaron Burr!”

Harpoon looked grimly at the colonel. Crap, he mouthed silently.

The Foxbats were on their tail now, fifteen miles back, gaining steadily, holding their six remaining missiles for a certain kill. Kazaklis seemed to ignore them. He gave no orders, said nothing. Only the methodical, droning voice of Tyler broke the radio silence. Okay, high terrain three miles, and it's significant. Up a bit. Down a bit. Little more. Hard left. Good. Kazaklis followed each instruction machinelike. The lightning bolt on his shoulder patch tilted in flawless rhythm with each banking turn around each rolling mountain corner. The white captain's bars rose in perfect harmony with the aircraft as he lifted it over each mountain ridge. His buttocks swayed in their parachute harness to the geometry of each maneuver. He was good. The Foxbats followed his every move.

“Bandits twelve miles and closing,” Tyler radioed, his voice devoid of emotion. “High terrain at twelve o'clock. Lift it. Dead ahead. Lift it.” Effortlessly the pilot lifted the plane, the captain's bars also rising. In front of her, Moreau's screen filled with ominous red clutter. On the right of her screen the yellow groundtracking altimeter, a little thermometer-like image displaying the plane's height over the ground, plunged rapidly. It bottomed out at twenty-five feet. Ka
-whack!
The brittle, cracking sound came from the bomber's spine. Moreau shuddered. The thermometer darted back up, even as Kazaklis nosed the bomber down over the other side of a ridge into a long, shallow valley. She glanced quickly at the pilot. His face remained impassive, his eyes glued on his own screen as they had been since the beginning of the ducking, darting roller-coaster ride through the mountains minutes ago. “Too close, pilot,” she said. His eyes held unblinking to the screen. He's part of the damned computer too, she thought. The Foxbats followed. “Bandits ten miles and closing.”

Kazaklis dropped the aircraft low into the valley. He had taken his pursuers on a long zigzag chase through the frozen mountains. He was back now, almost where he started, one ridge from the delta. In front of him the red screen still danced in leaping signals of danger, a vivid tableau he read as naturally as he had read the green screen just hours ago, taking his toy aliens up against the canyon wall. His mind was blank, as it had been then, his various other worlds excluded. No room to think. Thinking caused fuck-ups. Thinking would tell him that it was him or them, perhaps even bring in the emotion of fear. So his mind read the computer and sent light-speed signals to the fingers adept at so many tasks. He had taken the aliens up against the wall. He knew their secrets. But they never stopped chasing.

Long ago Kazaklis had accepted the inevitability of succumbing—somewhere—a minor slip, a SAM battery in Tiksi, a MIG roaring out of some niche in the Baikals, suicidal in its determination to save kids and lovers and parents in the city on the lake. Or simply sputtering engines,
Elsie-
style, and a crash somewhere in the wilderness short of the Chinese escape city. But not in a bleak and frozen valley in the Canadian Yukon, which he saw only in red computer images. “Bandits eight miles and closing.” He felt very tired.

“We've lost, Kazaklis,” Moreau said softly.

He stared into the red screen, a vivid computer-game house of horrors now. The last flight of the
Polar Bear,
his mind said, thoughts finally invading its sanctum. He turned and looked at her, pain but not fear in his eyes.

“They're taking their own sweet time, aren't they?” Moreau's voice was soothing and also unfrightened. She was readier than she thought, and had been, she realized, for some time.

Kazaklis broke his silence, still blustering. “You shovelin' decoys back there, Halupalai?” Then he went on private, his voice dreary. “Cat's got the mouse, Moreau, and he's playing.”

“You gave it a classy run through the hills, Kazaklis.”

The pilot ignored the compliment. “They really screwed up on the first pass. They'll close a couple more miles. All they gotta do is stay away from Halupalai's guns.”

“Don't imagine that has them terrified.”

“No. Not four of 'em with six missiles left.”

They went quiet again, the bomber noise rattling through their silence like a tin can full of loose pebbles as it raced along the valley floor. Kazaklis tapped the throttles, edging the speed back up toward Mach point-nine. His sweeping, swaying evasive maneuvers turned halfhearted, seeming to invite the missile launches. Then he reached over and nudged his copilot. “Maybe we oughta give 'em one more thrill,” he said, his voice impishly childlike.

Moreau looked at him and saw the brown eyes twinkling again,
the perfect white teeth gleaming. “Don't give me that sucker-bait Boom-Boom Room smile of yours, macho man,” she said. But she smiled, too.

“Bandits seven miles and closing,” the radio squawked.

“What if I put this hunk in a loop and came back on top of 'em?” Kazaklis chuckled. “Maybe they'd all die of heart attacks, huh?”

“Jesus, Kazaklis,” Moreau said, smiling at his childishness. “The wings would snap like twigs.”

“Maybe the shrapnel would get 'em.”

“Yeah. Maybe.”

“Sure surprise the shit out of 'em.” Kazaklis continued chuckling quietly, then peered sheepishly around the corner of his helmet. “Not such a good idea, huh?”

“Kazaklis, you really are a case,” Moreau said. “Born a couple of generations too late. You should have been a barnstormer, the Great Waldo Pepper defying death and deformity for the hayseeds in Iowa. Till you piled in, a legend.”

“Woulda lived longer,” he said pensively. But his voice changed pitch almost immediately. “The Great Kazaklis. Yeah. With you strapped to the struts of my Sopwith Camel.”

“Then you'd have to share the glory. You wouldn't like that.”

“Naw, suppose not.” Then he laughed uproariously. “With your knockers, lady. Share the glory with your knockers. Them horny old farmers would just be a-twitchin', waitin' for a look at the tits when your blouse blew off.”

Tyler cut in. “You have significant terrain at ten o'clock. High terrain at three o'clock. High terrain seven miles dead ahead.” The valley was closing around them. Moreau faded off. Their Loony Tunes navigator finally sounded as if he were navigating, their gunner was silently defending them with gum wrappers, their pilot was buried, as ever, in boobs. But she liked them, all of them. Suddenly she became very angry.

“Goddammit, how we screwed up!”

The mood change jolted Kazaklis. “The odds were a hundred to one,” he said defensively.

“Not you,” she said. “The fucking world. All of us. Anybody could have seen this coming. Why the hell didn't we see this coming?”

Kazaklis sighed. “The world's always been a dangerous neighborhood, Moreau. It became a very small neighborhood when we started packin' around zip guns that could snuff any city or cave in any mountain.”

“High terrain five miles ahead,” Tyler said.

Moreau froze.

“Or Tyler's high terrain,” she thought aloud.

Kazaklis looked at her strangely.

“Arm the first bomb,” Moreau said slowly. Kazaklis did not respond. “Arm bomb number one, dammit!”

“That's crazy.”

“Not as crazy as doing a loop, Waldo. Do it fast!”

The pilot's mind began racing again. He did not need to tote up his weaponry—six Short Range Attack Missiles tucked under his wings, four one-megaton hydrogen bombs stashed in the bay just fifty feet behind him. He ruled out the SRAM's immediately. He could make them turn circles, twist into figure eights, slip around a corner, and strike a target thirty-five miles behind him. But they were too difficult to reprogram quickly. The bombs were a different story.

Kazaklis had never seen inside the bulbous gray packages he carried, but he had a working knowledge of their innards. They were a complicated piece of machinery, maybe too complicated now. They certainly were not designed for Moreau's sudden brainstorm. The brutes were so powerful they required a nuclear explosion to set off the thermonuclear explosion. So they contained a plutonium trigger to set off a small nuclear bomb that ignited a Styrofoam explosive that finally detonated the thermonuclear explosion. The temperature inside reached twenty million degrees before the casing went. But the bombshells held far more than explosives. They contained altitude and velocity sensors, a drogue parachute to slow their descent, a delay fuse to give him a few extra seconds to escape. They also contained extraordinary safety devices. Hydrogen bombs had careened off the top of ICBM's, fallen out of B-52's, rolled off aircraft carriers, disintegrated in space launches. But none had ever exploded accidentally.

Briefly Kazaklis cursed the safeties—six coded interlocks known as the Permissive Action Link. The PAL was no pal now. He would be in one helluva hurry. Still, he had the codes. He did not think long. It was a long shot, but Moreau's cockeyed plan was not that cockeyed. It would require exquisite skill, exquisite timing, and exquisite luck. And those self-assured Russian fighter pilots would have to be so cocky they'd hold off a few minutes longer. Would he be that cocky? Yeah, he answered himself. If he were given a little more bait, which he intended to give the Russians, Kazaklis the Great would be that cocky. He smiled.

“Moreau,” he said, “you're too fucking smart to die so young.” Without pause, he continued: “Tyler, are the Russians flying in formation?”

“They're closing fast, commander.” Tyler now sounded confused and scared.

“Are they flying in formation, dammit!”

“Yes, sir,” the navigator flustered.

Kazaklis smiled again.

“Hokay, you guardians of democracy,” he exulted into the intercom, “secure the family jewels again. Our buddy with no jewels to lose has come up with a
real
ball-buster!”

Kazaklis immediately banked the plane left toward the last ridge between him and the river delta. He punched the bomb code into the little cipher box next to him, unlocking the interlocks and arming one bomb. His mind sprinted through timing calculations. Thirty seconds from release to detonation. Thirty seconds at six hundred miles an hour. Five miles. He would have to be damned lucky to catch the MIG's roughly that distance behind him. He did not bother to ask if they had followed his banking left turn. He didn't need to ask, feeling their lust for a crack at him in the wide-open Mackenzie flats. They'd wait for that shot. Just as he would, if he were on the chase.

“You may sit down, colonel,” Harpoon said evenly. “Mr. Burr will yield the floor in a moment.”

The colonel hesitated, fussily adjusting his glasses, and slowly seated himself. The others, with the exception of the admiral and the successor, shifted uncomfortably. The two men stared at each other wearily. The successor spoke first.

“Do you want to be remembered as an Aaron Burr, Harpoon?” he asked.

“Of course not, sir. I've devoted my life to my country. I love it. I will fight for it, as I am tonight, to the death.”

“You don't seem to be sayin' that.”

“Sir”—Harpoon felt an overwhelming sense of foreboding— “I'm not simply being asked to fight to my death tonight. I'm being asked to fight to the death of my country.”

“You sayin' we've been wrong?”

Harpoon thought for a moment, not to resolve doubts but to find the proper words. He looked at the row of clocks. They had thirty, perhaps forty-five minutes.

“We don't have time for apple pie, sir. In any normal sense, we are the wronged party tonight. This is not a normal night.” He paused. “No finer nation has ever been conceived on this earth. We have tried to correct wrongs within our own borders. We have tried, with less success—and often using our own standards—to correct them outside our borders. I believe we, like few nations, have tried to do our best by the world.” He paused again, and swept his eyes around a quietly vibrating compartment in which all other eyes were cast downward except those of the successor and the colonel. “No nation is always right. We've made mistakes, yes. Our largest was the relentless accumulation of the weapons we are now using. There will be no winners tonight, sir. But perhaps, just perhaps, we can find the wisdom to salvage a touch of the humanitarianism of which our country has been so justly proud.”

Harpoon stopped, somewhat embarrassed, and there was silence in the compartment. He stared at the successor without challenge and the man stared back with curiosity. Mistakes. God forgive them, they had made so many. God forgive him, he had participated in so many.