Trinity's Child (36 page)

Harpoon took a long, deep breath and then riveted his gaze on the successor. “You're a westerner, sir. Raised on a farm?”

“You find that a disqualification, Harpoon?”

“Not at all, sir. I'm a farmboy too. Kansas. We raised chickens. Got them ready for my mother's stewing pot with one stroke of the hatchet.”

“Done it myself. Very effective.”

“Yes, eventually. As a boy, I hated it. The chicken didn't die right away. It flapped around, headless, splattering blood all over the barnyard.”

The successor smiled thinly at Harpoon's analogy. “Then it collapsed, Harpoon, and ended up in the pot. This here chicken's already been spreading a lot of blood around.”

“The world's the only barnyard we've got, sir. I can't believe you would risk it. Are you saying that's your decision?”

The man reached over and picked up the Seal. “Nope,” he said, smiling enigmatically. “I'm sayin' I finally got me some options. I also have a few minutes. I'm going to think on it.”

With that, he stood and began to leave for his quarters, pausing briefly to ask: “Would you like to join me, Colonel?”

Beneath him, tugging perversely, Kazaklis could feel the strong drag of the bomb-bay doors. The shifting winds of the low Arctic mountain ridge buffeted at the open panels, swirling up inside the cavernous hold and changing the aerodynamic flow in ways he had not felt before. No practice-run radio chatter interrupted his concentration. Just the quiet drone of Tyler's drained voice. They were past the thirty-second mark—
ready . . . ready . . . now
—heading directly at the hastily determined drop point—
on the racetrack
  .just over the top of the next and last ridge.

In front of the pilot new lights glimmered. The Master Caution light, reacting to the buffeting, flickered on and off, Moreau punching it with a gloved forefinger each time it warned them of what they already knew. The other lights remained on, three yellow squares in a sequence of four, only the third still dark. Bomb Doors Not Latched. Bomb Doors Open. Bomb Doors Not Closed and Locked. On the red screen, computer-scrambled, Kazaklis could see the last ridge racing at him.
Significant terrain, twelve o'clock. . .
. Not so low this time, pal, no belly-scraping, no spine-snapping on this one.

“Bandits five-point-five miles and closing,” Tyler radioed. Kazaklis reached for the red lever, pulled it in sequence with two of his four crewmates, releasing the last safety mechanism.

Briefly the pilot wondered if the Russians could see the looming doors, spot them somehow in the glimmering white starlight, pick up a minuscule distortion on their radar screens. The thought faded, the commitment made. The ridge filled the screen, the ground-tracking thermometer plummeting as the frozen slope raced up at them. Two hundred feet, one hundred, seventy-five. That' s it.
Ka.-whack!
The plane shuddered again, less agonizingly this time. The ridge disappeared, the red screen opening to the flat panorama of the river flats. Kazaklis nosed the aircraft over slightly, taking it down the far side, where it would disappear briefly from the eyes of his pursuers. He counted down the last seconds, a fireproofed thumb poised on the release button. Briefly he and Moreau arched the B-52's nose to give the weapon one small lift before gravity caught it. The pilot depressed his thumb.

A split second of unholy silence pervaded the airplane, blotting out the engine roar. Then the five crewmen felt a slight lurch, sensed an eerie weightlessness, imagined the low groan of the bomb rack rotating to move the next weapon into place.

“Bomb away,” Kazaklis said. The fourth yellow light glared at him from the flight panel. Bombs Released. No duds, Kazaklis prayed silently. Oh, God, no duds.

Briefly, as her mind's eye had seen on the mission drill, Moreau saw the bomb lift heavenward, hover, and then roll over for its short descent, the drogue parachute popping to slow its fall. She began the turning, lifting escape maneuver and felt the controls tugging back at her, a hand on her arm. She turned toward the pilot.

“Not this time,” Kazaklis said. “Straight at the river mouth. Low.”

Moreau stared at him. Then she understood and her skin crawled. The Russian pilots, suspecting or unsuspecting, still had almost thirty seconds to launch their missiles. Kazaklis wanted no telltale escape maneuvers to tip them off. She drew in her breath. The winds from a one-megaton explosion would whip unimpeded across the open flats, tailing off from more than five hundred miles an hour at the ridge to better than one hundred miles an hour five miles away. The blast wave—a moving wall of crushing pressure—would be worse, far worse. Kazaklis was playing the odds on outrunning the effects rather than outrunning more missiles. Percentage baseball. Moreau accepted that.

In the back, Halupalai sat alone, feeling helpless and useless. And empty. Downstairs, Radnor alternately watched his screen and his crewmate. Since the flailing outburst with the broken pencil, followed by the tearful threat, Tyler had lapsed into a near-catatonic state. He said nothing to Radnor, his only words coming in mechanical and scrupulously precise instructions to the cockpit. Radnor felt no fear, either. Just a deep and pervasive sadness he found impossible to shake. On his screen he saw the four Foxbats racing relentlessly toward the ridge, following their path. “Plus fifteen seconds,” the wooden voice said. “Bandits five miles and closing.” Radnor watched Tyler's eyes move quickly to the little Kodak print above his console, seeming to see nothing, and then dart back to his screen. “Plus twenty seconds . . .” Radnor also turned back to his screen.

In the cockpit both Kazaklis and Moreau were counting silently. Tyler's voice synchronizing perfectly. “Plus twenty-five . . .” No launches, Moreau pleaded under her breath. No duds, Kazaklis beseeched. “Plus thirty seconds . . .” Kazaklis shuddered. Come on, baby, come on. “Plus thirty-five . . .”

“Goddammit!” Kazaklis shouted. “Blow, damn you, blow!”

“Detonation,” Tyler droned.

Kazaklis and Moreau jerked simultaneously. “Climb! Climb! Climb!” Kazaklis yelled, but Moreau had already begun, the two of them pulling together.

“Launches?” Kazaklis demanded of the crew downstairs.

“Plus forty seconds . . .”

“Bandits?” Kazaklis asked.

“Plus forty-five . . .”

“Tyler!” Kazaklis thundered. “Damn you! Bandits?” The pilot looked at the altimeter. Five hundred feet, six hundred.

“Plus fifty seconds . . .”

Kazaklis groaned in frustration.

“It's not Tyler, sir.” The awestruck voice of Radnor came on. “Oh, God in heaven . . .” His voice faded briefly. Then he murmured, “There's nothing to see, commander.”

In the navigation compartment, Radnor's eyes were glued to his screen. In the center half a white ball expanded furiously, like a malignant brain. The fireball was almost two miles wide and seemed burned into the screen, for Radnor's senses knew it had expanded and disappeared already. A ghostly plume began emerging from the top, almost as wide, rising a thousand feet a second. The remainder of the screen warped in dancing lines like heat rivulets in the desert. Radnor knew the rivulets were the blast wave, rolling at them just beyond the speed of sound, and also just beyond the speed of the aircraft. “Plus sixty seconds . . .” It was going to be now. Radnor braced himself.

Kazaklis and Moreau held the craft at twelve hundred feet, their knuckles aching. Suddenly they seemed weightless again. A feather wafting in splendid silence. Then the thunder crack snapped at them. The feather lifted high, sank, and lifted again. Kazaklis could hear the rivets groaning. Then it was past. “Friendly little kick in the rump, huh?” he asked, jauntily trying to cover the crack in his voice. Moreau said nothing. “Bandits?” Kazaklis asked again.

“Nothing came through that, commander,” Radnor said very quietly. “Nothing.”

The admiral sat alone in the briefing room, the maps blank now. He picked up the yellow phone. A thousand miles north, the
Looking Glass
general picked up his black phone instantly in response.

“Alice? Harpoon.”

The line was remarkably clear. Harpoon thought he could hear the general's sigh of relief.

“You made the snatch?”

“Condor's nested and fed.”

“You had our dongs shriveling, Harpoon. Rough down there?”

“Ummm. How many Buffs we got left?”

“We might be moused.”

“Alice, old friend, we're having enough trouble hearing ourselves tonight.”

“Suppose. Hard to say. Baker's dozen? They used Foxbats. Strange. My hunch is they were leading the Bears and Bisons in, looking for our advance interceptors. Found some Buffs instead. Musta surprised 'em. Next surprise is for their bombers.”

“Alice?”

“When we start throwin' rocks at 'em.”

“Ummm. Plan down here is peashooters and Delta Air Lines.”

“Delta Air Lines?”

“Skip it.”

“Must say SAC produced some damn good crews. One of 'em nuked the buggers. Four Foxbats comin' right up their tail. Made a perfect bomb run. Laid the egg—a megaton, for God's sake— right in front of 'em. Poof. No more Foxbats. How's that for a new air-to-air weapon system?”

“Used a bomb, did they? Maybe it saved the Soviet postmaster.”

“Harpoon?”

“I think I snatched a chicken-eater.”

In the
Looking Glass,
Alice paled. He looked at his primitive wall map, covered with multicolored dots. All he saw was green.

Until the moment just past, the crew of
Polar Bear One
had never dropped a live bomb—never seen a nuclear explosion, except in films. They operated almost entirely on theory, having studied the sterile statistics of escape velocities from both incident and reflected shock waves as well as the punishment their communications and navigation gear might sustain from gamma rays, X rays, skyflash, EMP, ionization, and other phenomena.

Kazaklis did a routine damage check, expecting none and finding only minor radio static as the atmosphere ionized above them. EMP was not a threat from this kind of blast, its effects coming only from extremely high-altitude explosions. He was mildly surprised that EMP hadn't struck them hours ago, shortly after takeoff. But he assumed that, located in the far Northwest corner of the country, they had been outside the rim of the EMP circle, and about that he had been correct.

Except for the routine damage-control checks with each crew station, not a word had been spoken since Radnor's quiet confirmation that the MIG's no longer existed. The altimeter read six thousand feet and Moreau silently pushed the craft higher and higher, back on the northerly course. About four minutes had passed.

“Bank it left,” Kazaklis said.

“No.”

“Bank it left.”

“No. I don't want to see it.”

“Bank it left.” There was no command in the pilot's voice, just persistence and a haunting echo of curiosity. She banked left and Kazaklis slowly drew back the curtain.

The shock of the light stunned Moreau, and at first, she threw an arm up over her good eye. The moonless Arctic night was not dark at all, and the glare, even four minutes later and now forty miles away, overwhelmed all images. Then slowly, over the barrier of her arm, shapes formed and colors bloomed. In the kittywumpis tilt of the aircraft window, the horizon cut diagonally one way and the majestic stem of the cloud the other. Lightning strikes, purple and violet, darted throughout the pillar. The radioactive gases and debris and water vapor churned inward on each other, over and over, the full twelve-mile length, snakes coiling on each other, devouring each other, and then emerging in ugly anger again. It was satanic. As she looked upward at filaments burning at the edge of the troposphere, the power seemed to touch heaven and holiness itself. It was godly. But as she looked down, where the drogue parachute had floated and the mountain ridge now floated in tumult unimaginable, the power seemed to emanate from other regions altogether. No training film, no lecture, no mathematical equation—no amount of psychic numbing—would prepare someone for this.

Kazaklis could not remove his eyes from the mountain ridge. It was gone, gouged out, and in his mind he saw volcanic Mount St. Helens near his boyhood home and he saw his father and he saw his father's belief in the eternity of nature, and he tried to believe in his father's belief. But his father had never seen this, and Kazaklis doubted again. One flick of a finger, his finger, had caused this. He knew that thousands of fingers were poised now over thousands of unnatural volcanoes, unnatural suns. In the distance he could not see through the crud to the center where he had caused the temperature to soar to 150 million degrees. But he could see the beginning of the flood. He could see where the heat of his own unnatural sun had cooled to the point where it no longer vaporized the northern ice into clouds but melted it instead, creating a gushing and raging new river, miles wide, that raced toward him across the once-frozen Mackenzie delta. He had turned Arctic winter into tropical summer. He cringed. And he doubted.

Moreau looked high toward the heavens once more, where the vapor cloud now stretched laterally away from both sides of the mushroom cap. And she knew that in the heights the ice vapor was cooling again, turning to water droplets that fell and froze once more into crystals and flakes. In the once-clear night sky she could see snow swirls falling from her cloud, a Christmas cloud with Christmas swirls from a Christmas gone. She felt ill and she brushed a fireproofed hand past another fireproofed hand also reaching forward, as the pilot and copilot pulled the curtain closed, together, mutually deciding that their psyches must be numbed again. Quickly. They sat mute, pushing their aircraft higher and away.