Trinity's Child (51 page)

“Where is the
E-4
now, Smitty?” Alice asked.

“About a hundred miles away, sir. North of Memphis. Circling over the river on the Arkansas-Tennessee border.”

“They'll spot us pretty soon.”

“Yes, sir. Figure it out, too.”

“Yes, I know.”

The pilot of the
E-4
had kept his windows unscreened since dawn, shortly before the grotesque scene with Harpoon. He had a dull, nagging headache. He took the eyepatch off one eye and placed it over the other. He was having a difficult time keeping the aircraft out of the dirty clouds. The flight was becoming more unreal than he had dreamed in his worst nightmares. The sporadic clouds moved to higher and higher altitudes, better for the people below, not good for them. Far below, the Mississippi Valley lay quiet and placid, seemingly as untouched as a day ago.

Untouched. He shivered as he thought of the admiral. The poor bugger must have gone over the side. He didn't know the admiral well, a swabbie in among all the flyboys. But he had seemed like a steady, level man. Christ, this kind of pressure could get to anybody. He double-checked the position of the
Looking Glass.
Was everybody going bananas? Why had Alice brought the plane so near them? They were scarcely a hundred miles away. And closing on him. He tried to radio the
Looking Glass
one more time. No response again. He went to the intercom. On the other end, the Librarian seemed momentarily puzzled. Then he shrieked at the pilot:
“Evade him! Run for it!”
The pilot's head throbbed. Evade him? It made no sense for the
Looking Glass
to crowd them, to come in where one missile could get them both. It made less sense to start a panicky run away from the SAC command plane. Especially in this environment. He took the aircraft out of its circle and headed east. But he did not do it in a beeline. He continued to avoid the clouds.

Something godawful had happened. The aircraft had decompressed. Kazaklis knew that, but he didn't care. He felt too good. She felt too good. In front of him the azure blue of the sky bathed him, soothed him, entranced him. His hand moved slowly on her thigh, incredibly sensitive fingers probing each taut muscle, each sensuous sinew. The sinews seemed to ripple in response, drawing him farther. Five seconds had passed.

She struggled, her senses sending conflicting messages. Her mind was sludgy, her body not. Her first thought was that the bullet had done it, illogically, irrationally chewing a hole in the pressurized crew compartment long after it had been fired. Her second thought came from a different part of her body, the lonely, aching part that had reached out earlier. The hand massaged deadened cords suddenly alive. She wanted to die this way, in euphoria and ecstasy. She turned and leaned left. Ten seconds had passed.

Kazaklis turned also, and looked at her. Moreau's face was haloed and shimmering, her eyes a ravishing match of sparkling sapphire and uncut diamond. He leaned toward her, brushing past lightning-bolt jewelry. Her lips were blue. She was dying. He touched her face. She slumped, raven lady, into his lap.

“No-o-o-o!” he screamed. Frantically he lurched at his dangling oxygen mask, drawing it to his face first, not out of selfishness but out of rigid training. If he went, she went, and he was going fast. He took one breath, then another and another, the raw oxygen driving ecstasy out and some sensibility in. Moreau's head lay peacefully between his legs, her eyes barely open. Another three or four seconds had passed, but Kazaklis had gained a few. He quickly drew the mask from his face and stretched it down into his lap, over hers. He pulled her partly upright and looked into her face. She wobbled back out of insensibility, briefly into the rapture again, and then flashed pure fear at him. Now he was going again. He had trouble finding the radio button. He couldn't remember her name. “Get. . . on . . . your . . . own . . .” Each word required a monumental effort. He took the mask away, roughly shoving her back toward her seat. He breathed. His peripheral vision was gone, narrowed into a tight tunnel, and he couldn't see her. The aircraft had nosed over slightly, the air speed increasing, and he pulled back on the wheel to level it. He could do no more. He breathed deeply and wasn't certain whether the light-headedness was coming from the hypoxia or the sudden gush of oxygen. Slowly, so agonizingly slowly, his senses returned. Twenty, thirty seconds passed.
Moreau.
That was her name.
Moreau!

He turned suddenly toward her in alarm. She sat with her shoulders hunched, the mask clasped over her face, staring straight ahead. They said nothing for a full minute—well beyond the recovery time, the brain responding almost as soon as the blood circulated the oxygen upward from their lungs. Then Moreau said, “Unseasonably cold for Hawaii, isn't it?” Her voice was strained, but together they began to take the aircraft down where they could breathe.

Minutes later, Halupalai's parachute opened at eight thousand feet, jerking him out of six miles of free fall. He did not feel it. He was alive but still unconscious. He awakened minutes later as his boots slammed into the sea, his weight taking him down toward the depths, then his buoyancy popping him back to the surface. His island was gone, lost over the horizon, obscured by the swells. But Halupalai was not looking for his island. He was looking for the choppers. He was not bobbing in the mid-Pacific but in the South China Sea, as he had the last time he pulled the lever so long ago. With his good arm, he activated his rescue beacon. The Air Force would risk fifty men to pull one downed flier out of the drink. Soon the silence would be broken by the distantly accelerating whump-whump-whump of the rescue team. The rope would come down, the divers, too, joining him in the swells. He waited confidently.

Several hundred miles to the southwest, the beleaguered captain of the newly commissioned nuclear carrier
Ticonderoga
heard no distress calls and sent out no search plane. His ship carried the proud name of a mothballed carrier from the previous great war. But the routine shakedown cruise had become a nightmare of a kind that no previous war, no training in Annapolis, could have prepared him for.

Shortly before 0600 Zulu, not long after sunset last night in these waters, America's vast military communications network had filled his radio room with a babble of escalating alert messages. Then they stopped, almost precisely as he saw the first eerie flare of light far over the horizon. Twenty minutes later he saw a second and larger flare, then several more. He knew little of the condition of the world. But he knew that Pearl, his next port of call, was no longer there. He also knew that, for him and his crew of four thousand, Pearl Harbor's disappearance was irrelevant. They would never reach a safe harbor, Pearl or any other. They had spent the night, and now the morning hours, frantically dodging Soviet attack submarines. They had peppered the waters around them with nuclear depth charges. He had sent out wave after wave of search aircraft. But he was losing.

The captain nervously tapped his fingers on the papers in front of him. A weather advisory warned him of a tropical storm approaching from the southwest. Briefly the old sailor in him said run for the storm and its cover. The new sailor told him there was no cover anywhere. He shuffled through the papers, glancing at the single terse message he had received from the outside since 0600. A priority all-listeners order to bring down a stray B-52. He shook his head wearily. What kind of jackasses were running the show up there? He had a nuclear-powered Victor-class Soviet attack sub on his butt. He was a dead man. And they wanted him to look for Buffs in the mid-Pacific?

Sedgwick awakened in a panic. The clock read 1750 Zulu. How much time could they possibly have? He turned toward the President, and his heart sank. The man lay quietly on his back, the I.V. still feeding into his arm. He reached out toward him and felt the tug of the tubing reinserted in his arm. He fell back and groaned in despair. A cool, comforting hand caressed his forehead. “Easy. Easy. It's going to be all right now.”

Sedgwick stared bleakly into the nurse's sad smile. “Why?” he asked. “Why can't I make you understand?”

“I do understand,” she said softly. “No more morphine.”

Sedgwick's eyes darted to the President's intravenous tube, then to his own. His legs throbbed. He looked back at the nurse in confusion.

“Blood serum,” she said. “Nothing else. He's going to hurt, but he's going to think.”

Sedgwick closed his eyes. “Bless you,” he said. “God bless you.”

The nurse looked at him desolately. “Is it going to do any good?”

“I don't know, miss. I really don't know.” Sedgwick had no idea how SIOP had scheduled the submarines. He was reasonably certain the President did not know either, having had no time for detail before the mad dash out of the White House to
Nighthawk One.
But Sedgwick knew there was a schedule. In his mind he could see them lurking, ready. He was Navy, and there always was a schedule for the submarines. At 1750 Zulu, it couldn't be far off.

“How long before he'll be coherent?”

The nurse wrinkled her forehead. “Half-hour. Forty-five minutes maybe. He'll be pretty rummy at first. He's been off it almost an hour now. You”—she cleared her voice in mock reproach— “you've been off it a while longer.” She chuckled. “You're the kind of patient who makes hospital legends, sailor. We get a lot of bed-wetters. But that was a new one.”

Sedgwick noticed for the first time that his sheet was dry, changed after he had passed out. People doing their jobs, he thought. All kinds of jobs. As trained.

“Is there anything you can do to bring him around faster?”

“Not much, I'm afraid. We could shoot something into him to hop him up now that we've knocked him down. It'd be very dangerous. And I truly don't think it would do any good. You'd probably have a babbling chimpanzee on your hands. Not the President you need.” She paused. “Are we really in that much trouble?”

“I'm afraid so,” Sedgwick answered. He felt the nurse shudder and pull her hand away. He looked at her and saw eyes that retreated in guilt, not fear. He reached for her hand.

“I'm sorry we screwed things up,” she whispered.

He squeezed the hand he had wrenched a half-hour earlier. “Believe me, nurse,” he said, “you aren't the ones who screwed
up.”

After the sudden and violent gust of wind cleaned out the B-52, the air pressure inside the cabin stabilized with the pressure outside. The wind stopped almost immediately, replaced by the barely perceptible rustle of thin air racing over the escape hole Halupalai had left in the top of the plane. Even as they began their rapid descent, Kazaklis reached forward and stripped his glove off the green screen, his hand becoming infinitely colder even than his contempt for the world that had placed them in this mess. The temperature had plummeted more than one hundred degrees in a split second. The pressure fell to less than three pounds per square inch, one-fifth of normal. The nitrogen in their body fluids began to form bubbles. Unless they descended quickly, they would begin to suffer from ailments ranging from the bends to paresthesia to uncontrollable choking. With the air outside their bodies thinning by a factor of five, the gases inside their stomachs and intestines expanded by a factor of five. The pain stabbed. To deal with this irritation, they had to vent the expanded gases through both available bodily orifices. This they did, without shame. Otherwise, they rode silently downward— each drawn deeply within, each depressed, each having more difficulty with the emotional stress than the physical stress.

Moreau did not look back. Kazaklis looked once, confirming with a quick glance that Halupalai's seat was gone, his buddy gone with it, and that they now had a gaping and irreparable hole in the top of their aircraft. Kazaklis made the rest of the descent feeling as if the hole had been torn through him. They leveled out at twelve-thousand feet, unsnapped their oxygen again, and quietly flew on, wordlessly telling each other that neither was ready to begin the discussion of their new dilemma. Kazaklis finally broke the silence. “The son of a bitch,” he said, his words emerging in a low, tormented hush. “The poor, dumb, wonderful son of a bitch. Damn him.” He pounded a newly gloved fist into his knee in hurt and frustration. “Why, Moreau? Why?”

Moreau stared straight ahead, unmoving. “He wanted to go home,” she said flatly. “He was happy there.” She fought against the shivering, still trying to shake the subzero cold out of her bones and adjust to the marginal warmth they had found. “Maybe that's what we should have done, too.”

Kazaklis turned to look at her questioningly. She continued to stare ahead, her oxygen mask hanging loosely below a clenched jaw. “Were you happy there?” he asked.

Her brow furrowed briefly, memories of the past Christmas flooding her mind. She had asked her father close to the same question. “I don't think happiness is one of the goals I set in life,” she replied, almost exactly as he had.

Kazaklis turned away. He peered out the cockpit window at the vast and vacant sea scarcely more than two miles below them now, its whitecaps clearly visible atop giant swells. It showed no sign of hostility, no sign of tampering, no clutter of crud and bodies. It was pure. Kazaklis, conveniently blotting out the possibility of a faulty and mangling ejection, envisioned Halupalai in it. His friend bobbed placidly in the swells, basking in their peacefulness, no more rejection, no more failure, not bothering to open his rubber raft, not bothering to begin the long and pointless search for a home that was long gone. He knew Halupalai wasn't going home. Kazaklis sighed. “Our lovable beachboy didn't do us any favors, bless his lost soul,” he said.