Trinity's Child (38 page)

Alice reached for a computer printout sheet of the targets struck by the Soviets. A cursory glance confirmed what didn't need confirmation. They had not struck the most sensitive new American bunker in West Texas. They had not struck Mount Weather, the ancient bunker in Virginia so well-known the press wrote about it. They had taken a crudely surgical slice at Washington, messing up the city pretty badly in their attempt to isolate out military targets. But they had not totally destroyed the capital. He shook his head in dismay. He didn't like this, didn't like it at all.

Alice looked up and saw Sam watching him curiously. The general quickly looked back down at his papers. Dammit, Sam, don't you be my conscience. You follow orders in this business or the business doesn't work. If you're aboard the
Enola Gay,
you fly over Hiroshima and forget it. If you're ordered to drop incendiaries on civilians in Dresden, you do it. And forget it. If you read later that the people raced screaming into the sea, burning phosphorous glued to their backs and burning underwater, you forget it again. That's modern life. Modern war. Very goddamn modern.

“You about ready, Sam?” Alice asked brusquely.

“Yes, sir. We have the orders plotted.”

“Then send 'em, dammit.”

And so they began sending the new orders. Slowly. On the reliable, low-frequency teletype.

The audio alert startled everyone. Kazaklis quickly stubbed out a cigarette. Moreau craned her neck toward the small teletype and watched in puzzlement as the machine started and stopped almost immediately. Halupalai, the pacing expectant father earlier, lumbered slowly out of the back and pulled the one-line message from its reel. Without glancing at it, he handed the paper to Kazaklis. There was a moment of silence as Kazaklis examined it. Then he handed it back and said, “Tell me what I already know.”

Halupalai read it aloud, methodically decoding in his head. “Orbit. Await orders.” The gunner paused and added, “I'll take it downstairs, commander.”

“Don't bother.”

“Commander?”

“Don't bother!” Kazaklis repeated, a frustrated touch of meanness in his voice. Halupalai shrugged and slouched back to his isolated seat.

“Take it easy on him,” Moreau reproached the pilot. “You'll have the whole crew ready for the rubber room.”

Kazaklis stared into the instrument panel and then turned angrily on her. “Do me a favor, Moreau. Bank the Doomsday Express left. Then shut up for a while, will ya? Huh?”

Moreau bristled, hardly having spoken since the detonation, and began placing the plane in orbit again.

Kazaklis glumly took a reading on their position. One hundred fifty miles into the Arctic Ocean. He glanced at his luminous watch. The minute hand had crept past 1100 Zulu. Five hours that seemed like five years. And they still didn't know where they were heading. He turned toward Moreau and saw the woman wheeling the aircraft intently, professionally into a slow orbit. He tried to drive the agitation out of himself.

“You ever kick your dog, Moreau?”

“I don't have a dog, Kazaklis,” she said tersely.

“I love my dog.”

Moreau looked at him, shook her head, and said nothing.

“You get the feeling we're going around in circles?” he asked, the lightheartedness sounding artificial.

“You get the feeling we shouldn't complete this circle?” she asked. Her voice carried a strange mix of hostility and pensiveness. It so caught Kazaklis by surprise he briefly went wordless. He forced a laugh.

“Reminds me of a Polish joke.”

“Oh, Christ, Kazaklis.”

“These two Polish pilots get into trouble. So the pilot says to the copilot, 'Let's do a 360 and get out of here.'“ Kazaklis laughed. Moreau didn't. Kazaklis went silent again.

“I think the Polacks have taken over the
Looking Glass,”
he continued after a second. Now his voice was pensive. “Do a couple of 360's and then move ahead one square.” He paused. “What do you make of this crap?”

Moreau thought for a second. “Maybe they're going to pull us back.”

Kazaklis looked at Moreau, tucking his chin into his Adam's apple, his eyes peering mockingly out of the bottom of his eyebrows. “Oh, yeah, Moreau. I can hardly wait.”

“I can think of reasons.”

“I almost forgot you're a general's brat.” Kazaklis immediately wished he had kept his loose tongue tucked away.

“Shove it, Kazaklis.”

“I kick my dog a lot, Moreau.”

She looked at him in curiosity, then shook her head again.

“Well, Moreau,” the pilot continued, “you can explain the strategic reasons to me when we're at low level over Baikal.”

“That's one place we're not going now.”

“I know.”

They dropped off into silence again, the Buff curling into its holding pattern, the hum of the engines deceptively lulling after the bone-jarring rumble with the Foxbats. Both retreated into their private worlds, trying to sort out the tangle of new realities forced upon them in the few short hours since the klaxon's wail at Fairchild, the bombs bursting in Spokane, their own bomb bursting behind them.

“You really don't think about the reliability regulations, do you?” Moreau suddenly broke the silence.

“Oh, God, Moreau, don't start on PRP now.”

“Why don't you think about it?”

Kazaklis sensed danger. His head told him to cut Moreau off. Quickly. But he didn't. “Because it's crazier than what we're doing,” he said sullenly.

“About even-Steven, I'd say. They had to come up with something. They invented the bomb and they had to give it to somebody. So they gave it to the politicians. The politicians kept building the fuckers—you do have me talking locker-room, Kazaklis—so they went out and found themselves thousands of kids to hold them. Kids. God, we're the old-timers. What are you? Thirty-one? I'm twenty-seven. Radnor's twenty-five. Even Radnor's an old-timer. They had twenty-year-olds fiddling with them.”

“It wasn't the kids who finally let it all go.”

“Probably not. Maybe we should thank PRP for that. There was no Personnel Reliability Program for the politicians. You ever hear of a Nixon or a Carter or a Reagan going down to San Antonio to take the test? You think the Politburo got psychological screening, whatever the hell they called it over there?”

“Not a one of 'em woulda passed.”

“No. The whole thing was an attempt at a rational answer to a problem with no rational answer. The shrinks got ahold of it and devised a system that required perfect people. Not many of them around. None of us passed tonight.”

Kazaklis grew nervous. He tried to divert her. “Oh-oh!” he said, throwing up his hands. “Here comes the Boom-Boom Room routine.” He battered her with a staccato recital. “Air Force Regulation 35-dash-99. Section two-dash-three. Figure two-dash-one. Personality and Behavior Factors That May Affect Reliability. Paragraph III. Factors Related to Awareness or Level of Consciousness.” He paused. “You know they spelled 'consciousness' wrong? Left out the first 's.' Little reminder that the people looking for perfect people weren't perfect.”

“Dated 14 April 1981.” Moreau smiled sadly. “You have read the PRP regulations, you phony.” She thought a moment. “A little random reminder. They might miss a digit in a code someday. They might get a random electric pulse in some computer. You think that's how it started?”

“That, pal, we'll never know.”

“No.”

Kazaklis turned thoughtful. “Moreau?” She looked at him. “Did the Boom-Boom Room thing really bother you that much? All the flyin' we did together?”

She looked at him a moment longer. “Sure it did. Who wants to fly with somebody who's been up all night boozing?”

“God, I'm surprised everybody in the outfit wasn't juiced to the gills,” Kazaklis said, melancholy creeping into his voice.

“A lot of 'em were. The brass went nuts trying to trace the marijuana roaches in Minuteman launch capsules. The Soviet Rocket Forces had a vodka problem that made you look like a Mormon. You were all right. A pig, but all right.”

Kazaklis grinned broadly. “Moreau, you're getting downright friendly in your sunset years.”

“Hours.”

“Don't get maudlin. It violates PRP.”

“Everything violates PRP. Paragraph I. Suspiciousness. Arrogance. Lack of Humor. Inflexibility. Preoccupation.” She paused. “Then comes Sensitivity. Now, that
is
dangerous. We sure didn't want sensitive people around the bomb. Paragraph II. Impulsiveness. Destructiveness. You like that one? Destructiveness.”

“Maybe I oughta message San Antonio that we've been showing destructive tendencies. Pull us off the duty.”

“Temper Tantrums.”

“Whoops.”

“Excessive Talking.”

“There goes the general's daughter.”

“Decreased Talking. Then in Paragraph III we have Daydreaming lumped in with Alcohol and Drug Intoxication, your favorite.”

Kazaklis grunted.

“Oh, I'm not taking another zing at you, Kazaklis.” She smiled, a faint and distant smile. “You were always full of more shit than booze.”

Kazaklis finally laughed uproariously.

“Unusual Happiness,” she said. “Paragraph IV. Unusual Happiness is followed by Unusual Sadness. And Suicide.”

The drone of the engines cut through the pause. Then Moreau went on quietly, still quoting from the regulations: “Suicide: Particularly significant when accomplished through the deliberate detonation of a weapon. . . .”

Kazaklis stared hard at her. She seemed far away, and briefly, he felt angry again, not being able to sort out his own new uncertainties.

“Moreau,” he said slowly, “you and I both chose this path. You signed up for this trip. You signed up for the saki-and-bow-to-the-emperor squad.” But he knew she wasn't talking about her suicide. He knew she was talking about distant decisions made by others that meant the world now must absorb fifty thousand of the gray packages the crew of
Polar Bear One
had discharged in the wilderness of the Richardson Mountains. She was talking about a world that was taking the kamikaze oath. His skin tingled. Then the audio alert startled him again.

“Here come the orders to return to Spokane,” he said blandly. “You think we'll get a ticker-tape parade?”

In the
Looking Glass,
the black phone lighted again. The general reached for it quickly.

“Alice?” the voice said. “Harpoon.”

“Good grief, man, how are you? We were worried.”

“I need a word.”

“Hard to talk now.”

“A word.” The voice was insistent.

“Take it easy, Harpoon. What's on your mind?”

“Never mind. I have it.”

“Hey, buddy, what gives?”

“Call them back.” The voice was plaintive.

“Call who back, Harpoon? What the devil are you talking about?”

“The bombers, general. Please.”

Alice reached for another Pall Mall, not caressing it at all this time. “Harpoon, the orders are out. Under National Command Authority. Condor's authority.”

The phone seemed to go dead for a moment.

“Harpoon?” Alice asked.

The phone connection suddenly sounded very weak. “Never mind,” Harpoon said faintly. “I've got it. It's anthropocide. Yes, that's it. Anthropocide.” Then Alice heard Harpoon click off.

The general looked up at Sam with deep concern. “I don't think Harpoon has both oars in the water,” he said bleakly.

Halupalai spent several painstaking minutes decoding the latest orders while Kazaklis and Moreau fidgeted up front. At last he handed Kazaklis the message, and the pilot flooded it with his red-filtered flashlight. Moreau watched his face grow tight as he quickly scanned the single long sheet.

“Jesus H. Christ,” he said, his voice rising slowly in disbelief. “They want us to run all over Russia. . . .”

REF TWO ONE ZEBRA. IMPRO PATTERN ONE. PRECISE DELIVERY TO COORDINATES MANDATORY. TARGETS HARDENED. STRIKE ALL TARGETS. PRIORITY CHEREPOVETS. REPEAT. PRIORITY CHEREPOVETS. CAUTIONS. MOSCOW REGION PARTLY INTACT. LENINGRAD REGION WHOLLY INTACT. NO COVER. SOVIET COMMUNICATIONS BELIEVED NEAR ZERO. REF TWO ONE ZEBRA.

Next came a sequence of six targets and coordinates, fuel-depletion estimates, and specific weapon assignments for each. Cherepovets was second on the list, the first being a twin-SRAM attack on a target that by the pilot's rough reckoning was somewhere in the Urals perhaps a thousand miles east of the coordinates for Cherepovets. He didn't recognize any of the place-names, including the priority target. Behind the coordinates for Cherepovets the orders read, in brackets, “
RYBINSK MINING WORKS
.
” The four other targets were located in a cluster less than one hundred miles apart and, from the locators, appeared to be in the vicinity of Leningrad but not in the city itself. That gave them a clear run out over the Gulf of Finland to an escape field north of Stockholm, with Helsinki as a nearer but clearly less desirable alternate. However, it was obvious at a glance that the designer of improvised pattern one had made extraordinary assumptions, all optimistic, about fuel consumption. The entire flight was to be made at low level.