Trinity's Child (10 page)

To Halupalai, the wave was mystical, almost metaphysical. His earliest memories, those spellbinding image warps of infancy, etched the wave in some magical place in his mind. Even before he could speak, he toddled down to the sandy beach to watch it for hours, entranced. It emerged from the sea, swelling hypnotically until the little boy's neck craned high to watch the sunlight filter through the perfect prism of its curl. Then it crashed, thundering with the infinite power of nature, and sent swirls of foam and churning coral bits and little messages from distances undreamed washing up around the boy's naked feet. He could imagine no power greater. Soon his father taught him how to meld with it, not conquer it, for that was futile and wrong and ungodly. He learned to slice through its awesome strength, his body a spear, and swim far out beyond into the peaceful cradle of the sea. There he would bob for an entire afternoon before returning, stretching his young body rigid to ride the curl. Still later, he learned how to ride inside the curl, caught within the prism of dancing, holy light. He took endless voyages inside the curl, respectful of its power, worshipful of the halo of green-white radiance surrounding him. One day his father took him to the island of Oahu and they traveled north to the remote beach called Makaha. The boy stood mesmerized. The wave rose out of the ocean like a mountain, taller than the palms, taller than the houses. It loomed four, five times as high as anything he had seen on Kauai. The water roiled like a devil's caldron at his feet. He looked up at his father, his eyes asking in both fear and expectation: Is this the next test? His father shook his head no. This was for fools and haoles, mainlanders who believed they could control all forces. A dozen years later, however, Halupalai came back, a high-school boy full of beer and the playful challenges of a California-born schoolmate, a haole who had conquered every wave from Malibu to San Onofre. Halupalai caught the curl of a thirty-footer, riding it flawlessly and ecstatically, never feeling such exhilaration as he pulled himself from the whirlpool tug of the caldron moments later and threw himself on the beach. His friend never came out. They found him later, his spine snapped clean where the curl had landed on it.

As the light invaded the B-52, Halupalai sat with his back to the cockpit. O'Toole sat alongside him. Halupalai closed his eyes instinctively, but even so, even with his back turned, the light was so strong he could see the veins in his eyelids twist like rivers on a roadmap. Just as instinctively, he reached for the ejection lever, as he had in Vietnam. But he pulled his hand back abruptly. He braced himself. He did not want his hand on the lever when this wave hit.

Up front, Kazaklis  began counting even before he looked at Moreau. He continued to count as his own flash-shocked vision fought to focus on her one vacant eye. He ticked off the seconds as he implored her to help him push their aircraft higher, higher.

Three . . .

Four . . .

The Buff was tough. But he knew it broke, sometimes under natural forces they still didn't understand. More than once Kazaklis  had felt the godawful shudder, heard the thunderous crack of the B-52 in whiplash, as he roared low over mountain ridges where powerful wind currents collided and clashed.

Five . . .

Six . . .

The Air Force kept the occasional crashes as quiet as possible. But Kazaklis  heard. And Halupalai heard. And they both knew another Buffs back had been broken, snapped clean by the same kind of roiling forces that cracked a man's back in the ocean surf.

Seven . . .

Eight . . .

Kazaklis did not know what would happen now, for this would be no natural force and no man had ever felt it, no aircraft had ever been subjected to it. He knew only that survival was ninety percent luck of the draw, ten percent him. He would play the ten percent and climb, climb.

Nine . . .

Ten . . .

Moreau pulled with him, thank God for that. It would take both of them. He squinted, trying to readjust his eyes to the red light. The altimeter read 8,500 feet, 8,600.

Eleven . . .

The blast wave arrived with no noise interrupting the engine drone. But Kazaklis felt as if he had been hit in the gut first, then clubbed by a street fighter. The impact hurled him forward into the pinched embrace of his seat harness, then whipped him back. He could feel what he couldn't hear—the B-52's wings groaning under the immense stress. Groggily he fought to keep the plane climbing.

“Get the nose down, Kazaklis!” Moreau's steely voice hammered through the pilot's haze. “Dammit, you're going to stall us!”

Fuzzily Kazaklis concentrated on the air-speed gauge. It read under Mach point-five, about 325 miles an hour, two-thirds of the climb speed just seconds earlier. The horizon indicator seemed to have been blown completely out of kilter, showing them at a thirty-five-degree angle of attack, nose up, tail down. The altimeter was at ten thousand feet and still rising. It made no sense at all. His training told him the blast wave would drive the plane down, not up.

“Gauges malfunctioning!” Kazaklis shouted.

“No. Nose down!”

He ignored the copilot's dissent. The air-speed indicator dropped to Mach point-four, yellow alarm lights flashing like bonus lamps in one of his pinball palaces. He ignored them, too— little liars nuked—and held on as if he were strangling the wheel. Mach three-point-five. Kazaklis, following his instincts, was doing everything wrong. Pain stabbed at his forearm. He turned to strike back at Moreau, who had judo-chopped his right arm to loosen the grip that threatened to put them in a fatal stall. She sat hunched over her wheel, nudging the nose down. Mach three-point-seven. Then the aftershock hit, the wave sending a quiet shudder upward through the pilot's feet, and then again, twice more, rapidly, pocketa, pocketa, massaging his back like magic fingers in a cheap motel. All three aftershocks were soft, feathery, gentle—and telling. Kazaklis  withdrew his upheld arm, took the wheel, and helped Moreau get the nose down.

“Jeezuz,” Kazaklis  muttered absentmindedly, “that was closer than a tit when you're screwin'.”

“Missionary style,” Moreau said blandly.

Kazaklis  cocked an eye at Moreau, as if he had lost track. She stared straight ahead, but he laughed anyway.

“Only way I know how, copilot. I'm just a country boy.”

“Uhm.”

They leveled the plane out at 10,500 feet and then quickly adjusted it back to a steady climb rate.

“Well, I owe you one, Moreau,” Kazaklis  said.

“We're even, commander. One airplane for one eye.”

Moreau's voice was steady. Kazaklis  looked at her again to see what he should read into that one. But there was no way of telling. She still stared straight ahead.

“Okay, let's find out what happened,” Kazaklis  changed the subject. “It's still a long way out of this sonuvabitch.” He switched to all channels. “Navigator, this is the pilot. You guys comfy down there?”

For a moment there was no answer. Then Tyler came on, his voice flat. “Scope's messed up.”

“You sure? Ours are working now.”

Tyler's voice turned brittle, his words biting with challenge. “Goddammit, I said my scope's messed up!”

Down below, the navigator and radar operator sat side by side at small desklike radar consoles in the windowless well hole of the navigation compartment. Alongside Tyler were the stairs leading topside to the other four crew members and behind the stairs a small open space leading to the locked hatch into the landing-gear hold and then the catwalk around the bomb bay. The light always was red here, even in daytime. The place was a closet, claustrophobic, and the pervasive red lighting pulled the walls in even closer.

Since the flash, which had bounced down here like an errant strobe light, Radnor had been transfixed by his radar screen. It was focused tightly on the area in front of the aircraft. The screen had flared with the flash. But now it was normal, except for a little more snow than usual. And an ugly red splotch, pulsing like a jellyfish, that crept out of the corner, partly on the screen, partly hidden beyond its range. But the radar was working.

Radnor looked over at Tyler, whose screen was set on a wider field, yielding a picture in a cross-hatched fifty-mile radius around the plane. Tyler's screen showed snow flurries too, but it also seemed to be working. The navigator had not moved, his eyes glued to the screen. Radnor leaned toward him for a closer look. His jellyfish, reduced on the broader field, looked like an amoeba under a microscope. Then the circling arm of the radar passed over another amoeba, and another. Radnor felt a sob catch in his throat. The color in his face faded, the freckles throbbing like painful welts in the red night light. Mechanically he did distance calculations. He pulled back away from Tyler's screen, tears welling in his eyes. He waited, fighting back the tears, swallowing the sob out of his voice. Then he spoke to Kazaklis . “Three detonations, commander.”

“No!” Tyler shrieked the rejection.

“One slightly below us, maybe five miles ahead, fifteen degrees south. The others are behind us, air-burst altitude, due east . . .” Radnor's voice broke briefly. Then he added, “Roughly twelve and sixteen miles now.”

“No. No.” Tyler sounded calmer now, but insistent. “Radnor's wrong. My screen's a scrambled egg. I don't see that at all.”

Radnor tried to place a reassuring hand on Tyler's shoulder. Tyler savagely pushed it away.

Up front, Kazaklis  motioned Moreau to go on private once again.

Moreau spoke first. “Tyler hasn't got much to go home to,” she said quietly.

“Dead center. One on the base and one on the town.”

“Bastards.”

“This ain't tiddlywinks, pal. What would you have done? Hit Grand Coulee Dam and tried to flood us out? They wanted to catch us on the ground. It almost worked. So they kicked us in the butt with two that should have caught us, and almost got us with a misfire. . . .”

“Almost . . .” Moreau said pensively, rubbing an eye that neither saw nor hurt.

Kazaklis  ignored her now. His mind searched through his options. He had at least three problems, and one—the radiation, about which he could do nothing—would have to wait.

“What would you do if you were a submarine commander and your job was to take us out, all the way out?” he thought aloud.

“Hit us again in thirty to sixty seconds,” Moreau replied. “In case I missed, in case somebody escaped, in case my warheads detonated each other. Submarine missiles are not that accurate. And they're fratricidal.”

“That's right. They probably sprayed us with a dozen warheads, most of which killed each other. So if you were sitting out in the Pacific guessing ten minutes ago, where would you have dumped the next load?”

“West. They knew we would take off west. And north. Where we're turning.”

“Right . . . and wrong. We're turning south.”

Moreau chuckled for the first time since takeoff. “Tahiti,” she said. “The senator from Vermont would love it. For all we know, he's President by now.”

“No palm trees for you, Moreau. I gotta loop us around one big hot mother of a cloud. Percentage baseball. And you've gotta see if there are any friendlies still flying with us. Check Radnor and then try to find the rest of the squadron.”

Moreau felt the big plane bank sharply left. Percentage baseball, indeed. That's what Kazaklis  said every time he took a risk, and this was damned risky—brushing them up against a very radioactive cloud on the chance they had outguessed a Russian submarine commander. They had already taken one dose of radiation, God knows how large a dose.

“We need a REM count,” Moreau said.

“You're not glowing in the dark yet, Moreau.”

“Get off my back, Kazaklis . We need to know how much radiation we took.”

“Not now, we don't. It's irrelevant, isn't it? It's a ten-hour trip. You're gonna live long enough. We'll check it if we get out of here. Right now, I'd rather know if we have any friends with us.”

Radnor already had started looking, and he was confused. “Beats me, captain,” he told Moreau. “I can see only one aircraft on my screen. It's big enough to be a B-52. Could be commercial, but he's sure in a strange place. Half-dozen miles behind us, very low, heading northwest.”

Moreau changed radio channels.

“Polar Bear cubs, this is Mama Bear looking for strays,” she said. “Do you read? This is
Polar Bear One
looking for
Polar Bear Two.

“Hello, Mama Bear.” The voice, scratched by radio static, carried a strong Texas imprint. “Nice to hear yore voice. This is
Polar Bear Three.
Ya-all lookin' for us, too?”

“You're way off course,
Polar Bear Three.”

“Not suhprisin'. Nope, not a-tall suhprisin' to hear that.”

“Polar Bear Three,
do you have problems?”

“Might say so, Mama. Couple.”

“Can we help you?”

“Don't rightly think so, thanks. Ya-all get to write the manual for World War Four, underline the part about pullin' yore screens, hear?”

“You're blinded.” Moreau felt a tiny pang of dread.