Trinity's Child (22 page)

Moreau looked over at Kazaklis. The pilot stared back, his eyes saying nothing. He reached into his flight bag for a big red bandanna, the kind he once wore in the Oregon woods. Moreau's skin prickled again.

“We have to open the flash curtains,” he said.

“I know,” Moreau said. She also knew that, at night, a nuclear explosion fifty miles in front of them could take her other eye. She also knew that, once again, Kazaklis was playing percentage baseball. Odds were the Russians would not come at them now. But the planes were sitting ducks and Kazaklis was covering his bet. He wrapped the red bandanna, doubled and redoubled in tight folds, over his left eye and tied the kerchief behind his head. If the odds were wrong, there would be one good eye left of the four in the cockpit of
Polar Bear One.

Kazaklis reached across and pulled the dirty-gray curtain. So did Moreau. The night light streamed in and the white radiance of endless snows reflected fluorescently up at them. Moreau blinked at the brightness. It was a wonderland—and very threatening.

“Helmets!” Kazaklis said into the intercom. “Okay,
Elsie,
sweetheart, we are at one nautical mile and starting our climb,” Kazaklis drawled into the radio. “You look beautiful up there, baby, just beautiful.”

The tanker did look beautiful, Moreau thought, hypnotically beautiful. By rote she helped Kazaklis maneuver the bomber up toward the illuminated underside of the KC-135. Her good eye was frozen on the tanker. In reality the two huge aircraft warily closed on each other at near-identical speeds of five hundred miles an hour, the bomber climbing steadily. But the illusion was far different. The tanker, framed in white night lights, seemed slowly to descend on them like a space platform, the glare of its lights blotting out the Arctic stars.

“Looking good. Stand by for half-mile.”

Still, it was the breakaways that took your breath. Suddenly your stomach was falling up. But in the illusion, only the surreal white platform moved, taking off straight up, escape-velocity-rapid in the mind's eye, like a
Star Wars
mother ship accelerating into inky space. Tonight it wouldn't be that way. The tanker might do anything. Barrel roll, snapping off a wing. Sag back into their faces. Nose over on top of them. Moreau shuddered.

“All crew on oxygen.”

Moreau turned away from the descending lights. Beyond Kazaklis, out the left window, the moon was setting below them now, a giant yellowish ball perched between two white crags in the far-off Mackenzie Mountains. She flinched, her last moon vision suddenly invading her memory, and snapped her head right. In the crystalline night, she could see forever. Below her, snow and ice, glowing in the Arctic moon-set, stretched flat and endlessly to the horizon. The southernmost arm of Great Bear Lake, clearly outlined, snaked off to the northeast toward the main body of the great frozen lake. Below them the tundra, unmarked by a hint of civilization, ebbed and flowed softly, Sahara-like, in windblown snow dunes and rippling white eddies. Suddenly lights flared far off the wingtip. Moreau lurched toward the flash screen, then slowly pulled her hand back. For God's sake, she told herself, calm down. Even the northern lights are spooking you.

Kazaklis appeared not to notice. “Closing now,” he said. “Nudge it right. Nudge!”

Moreau snapped her full attention to the front of the aircraft. The platform was almost on top of them, the immense refueling probe hanging from the tanker's midsection, the probe's green-lit nozzle hovering no more than a dozen feet in front of the windshield. It swayed—inches right, inches left—like a snake's head poised for the strike. Moreau flinched again.

“Doing just fine. Little left. Little down. Careful, now. Careful! Up a bit!”

The snake passed over their helmets.

“Now!”

Clunk!
Moreau felt the angry wrenching of metal, heard the grinding steel teeth lock onto the huge phallic probe just inches behind her head. The great plane heaved, its wings shuddering, and then it began a slow, groaning undulation up and down in rhythm with the tanker. Kazaklis felt the tendons in his arms stretch to the ripping point. Moreau watched her knuckles turn dead white on the wheel as, together, they fought to mate the Buff to the bulbous plane above. The tanker's tail loomed almost directly over their heads, visible and threatening through the overhead windows. But behind them the probe settled into place and the JP-4 jet fuel, lifeblood, began to surge from the tanker into the B-52. Kazaklis relaxed somewhat, took one hand off the wheel, and looked at his watch. It showed 0852, twenty-three minutes since they talked with Klickitat. Good. It was damned good.

“Beee-yootiful!” Kazaklis radioed above.
“Elsie,
baby, you did great!”

“Yeah,”
Elsie
responded. “Not bad for a dame, huh?”

Kazaklis turned toward Moreau and winked a grotesque wink, made even more bizarre by the Sinbad look of a pilot with a red bandanna wrapped diagonally over the other eye. He grinned. How the hell did he ever get surrounded by women, working women, in this business?

“Not bad for a dame,
Elsie,”
he acknowledged. “Not bad at all.”

“You looking up at me, commander?”

“Right up your . . .” Kazaklis paused. “Right up at your lovely frame,
Elsie.”

“Yeah, I know, you dirty old man. Look a little farther up. You see that red on my belly?”

Kazaklis moved his eyes up the white undercarriage of the tanker until they fixed on the blinking red beacon.

“Looks like it's working fine,
Elsie,”
Kazaklis said, puzzled why the pilot would be worried about her beacons.

“That's what I'm worried about, ace. I'm a black widow tonight. Don't you forget that. A red-bellied black widow. You know about black widows, mate?”
Elsie
placed an extra edge on the last word.

“Run across 'em,
Elsie.
Deadliest of your species.”

“Gender,” she corrected him. “A little black lady spider, with a red spot on her belly. Known for killing the daddy.”

“Right after screwin',” Kazaklis said flatly.

“Right after screwin', mate.”

Moreau tightened her grip on the wheel. This was certain death for the crew of
Elsie.
And for
Polar Bear One?
A midair collision, at worst. For a few extra hours, at best. Assuming something else didn't get them. Which was a big assumption. What did that add to the chances of a suicide mission? One percent? Doubtful. Training was driving them now. Moreau wasn't sure this was percentage baseball. Neither, apparently, was Kazaklis.

“You sure you want to go down to the last drop?” the pilot asked
Elsie.

“Nervous?”
Elsie
asked.

“Serious.”

“What are your chances of getting in now?”

“Next to zero.”

“What are your chances of getting out?”

“Zero.”

“What are your chances of getting in with more fuel?”

“Next to zero.”

“And out?”

“Next to zero.”

“We'll go down to the last drop, commander.”
Elsie'
s radio voice crackled but did not crack.

Kazaklis stared vacantly up at the tanker, briefly fixing on the ghostly vapor trails streaming out of her four engines. The exhaust poured out steel-mill-hot and then froze, snap, into ice-crystal fog faster than the eye could see. He remembered teenage jet trails that had seemed to go on forever. Now he had to watch them snap out again. “You got balls,
Elsie,”
he said, and only he seemed to notice the choke in his voice.

“No, commander,”
Elsie
replied. “They issued us everything but those. What we got, if you want to get schmaltzy, is our duty.” Then she added, with a wry chuckle, “And if you want to get technical, we got our orders—empty the pump,
Polar Bear.”

“Okay,” Kazaklis acquiesced. The pilot could feel the anxiety building. Everybody was scared stiff, including him. “What's your best fuel estimate?”

Elsie's
voice returned firmly. “Eight minutes. Ten minutes.”

“How do you plan to break away? Without power, you can't go up and you could belly in on top of us. We can't go up through you.”

“I ought to be able to hold it level for a moment,”
Elsie
replied. “If I can't, I'll nose it down slightly. If that doesn't work, I'll put it in a spin. Left. Got that? Left.”

Moreau had a nightmare vision of tangled wings. But she also knew what a spin meant to
Elsie.

“Got it,” Kazaklis said.

“You put the brakes on and dive. Fast. Got that?”

Kazaklis paused and thought hard. Percentage baseball, he sighed silently. He switched to the intercom and radioed downstairs: “Keep your mother-lovin' eyes peeled down there. We've got the window open and don't need visitors.” Then he spoke to
Elsie
again. “We got it,
Elsie.
Your soulmate on my right will handle that part.”

Moreau looked at Kazaklis in surprise. He reached up slowly and pulled away the protective bandanna. Then he locked both eyes on the contrails from
Elsie's
four engines and didn't say another word. Nor did she, as her arms locked on the controls just as firmly.

Moreau last visited her father at Christmas, a month before the flight of
Polar Bear One.
It was a spectacular holiday of all-day skiing and crackling evening fires with rare steaks and rarer brandy high in the exhilarating alpine air of the Rockies near Steamboat Springs. He had retired there, with four stars, choosing the mountains because he loved them and Steamboat Springs because it was just near enough to keep his distance but also make his occasional lectures at the Academy in Colorado Springs.

It had not been an easy year for her. Finally, they had put her in a bomber where she was determined to be. Her father had sent congratulations, no more, when she got the assignment at Fairchild. Those first months had not been calm and she had lain awake night after night with pounding migraines for which she could not find relief because PRP would find the migraines. And then there was the men thing, the flamboyant, compulsive, self-destructive men thing which she had stopped, cold turkey, like a nun, a nuclear nun, almost a year ago.

So Steamboat Springs had been a tonic. Her father was in his sixties, the strands of iron gray turned to a sheath of steel. But he still stood ramrod straight, still forced her to her physical limits as they raced through the deep powder of this cold winter's early snows. The only sign of age was in his eyes, the radiant blue having faded some, the riveting gaze occasionally drifting into a distant other world.

On the last day, they skipped the skiing, walked the snow-banked streets, stopped for Riesling and cheese in an overdone Swiss chalet, and then headed back to their A-frame condo.

The fire seemed brighter that last night, the brandy more heady. Moreau looked at the man, whom she worshiped and after whom she had patterned her life, and knew that if an oedipal complex existed for women, she had it. They both got a little giddy and a trifle silly as the fire burned down, the brandy taking them into the high clouds which provided such ecstasy for them both.

“Are you happy, Dad?” she asked suddenly.

His eyes turned perceptibly gray, and then moved away from hers to stare into the fire. “Happy?” he repeated, as if it were a question he never had been asked. “I suppose happiness is not one of the goals I set in life.”

“No. You only set one real goal, didn't you?”

“Preserving mankind? Sounds terribly pompous now, doesn't it?”

“No. No, it doesn't. It sounds incredibly beautiful. Like you. And you gave that to me.” Moreau looked at her father and saw that not only had his eyes faded, but his face turned sallow and gray now, too. Her heart fell and she took her brandy snifter, clattering it loudly off his in an attempt to regain the silliness and giddiness.

“My God, you are something, old man,” she said brightly. “I could go for you. Did you ever think how remarkable it is we never thought of incest?”

Her father turned back toward her, some of the glitter returning to his eyes at the ludicrous perversity of the thought. “Well, Mo,” he said blandly, “you never brought it up.”

“Father!” she exploded in laughter. “You old bastard, you! The original male chauvinist pig! I never brought it up, huh? You old phony!”

They reached for each other in a bear hug that was sensual beyond measure, sexual not at all.

“Oh, we've practiced incest for almost thirty years now, Mo,” he finally said. “Incest of the mind.”

“Some people call it mind-fucking.” Moreau laughed, and her father withdrew again.

“I know,” he said, and the words were painfully forlorn.

“Hey, wait a second, Dad. Let's start over.”

“I want you to stop, Mo.”

“Hey, hey, hey. I was kidding, Dad. You know that. Remember me, the skinny little kid with super-Dad?”

“I want you to stop flying. It isn't going to work, Mo. We're losing.”

Moreau sat in stunned silence.