Trinity's Child (31 page)

“Giving them access to the Indian Ocean,” the successor said. The two military men were talking around him, but he ignored it. He felt relieved. Let them know you understand the Soviet mind.

Harpoon waved the colonel off, glanced hurriedly at his watch, and continued. He moved the pointer far south. “We don't have any notion what happened in South Africa. They had primitive weapons. They exploded them in their own territory. The motives may have been racial.”

The pointer skittered back to Asia. “Other than the two superpowers, the Chinese did the most damage and took the worst beating.” The pointer moved quickly along the endless frontier from Samarkand to Vladivostok. “The Soviets had about fifty divisions along the border. The Chinese tried to destroy them. They may have incapacitated a fourth of the Soviet border forces. The Soviets used tactical weapons against Chinese border troops, then, moments before we launched our first major wave of ICBM's—” Harpoon faltered again, puzzled, as Alice had been, by the American attack sequence. But he pushed on, not wanting to clutter the problem further— “the Soviets hit Peking and the industrial city of Wuhan with thermonuclear weapons. They appear to have stopped after that.”

The successor missed the pause, and the puzzlement. “So only the Chinese helped us,” he said.

“The Chinese didn't help us,” Harpoon replied more curtly than he intended. He could feel his caution dissolving, his time compressing. “They tried to help themselves, as did everyone else. Anything that makes the Soviets feel more threatened now should be cause for alarm, not satisfaction, inside this aircraft.”

The successor stiffened. “Harpoon,” he said in bewilderment, “sometimes when you open your mouth I feel like it isn't connected to my ears. Would you like to say that a different way?”

“No, sir. We are quite pressed for time.” The successor looked at him curiously, but Harpoon had decided to bull onward. It was time to lay it on the line. He beckoned to a three-star general sitting at the briefing table.

“The general is expert in nuclear effects and their meaning to civilian populations, political structure, social structure, et cetera. Would you speak as briefly as possible to that subject, general?”

The general rose reluctantly. “Let's try to deal quickly with the rest of the world,” he began. “The world has survived plague, pestilence, famine, earthquakes, floods, wars, disasters of immense proportion—”

Harpoon frowned. “General,” he interrupted, “keep it short. Please.”

“Sorry, admiral, but it is important to understand the context. In the 1920's an earthquake killed two hundred thousand people in Tokyo and Yokohama—approximately the number killed in the World War Two atom-bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki twenty years later. We have forgotten the earthquake.” He let the words sit very briefly. “My point is simply that the world has absorbed such punishment, natural and man-made, in the past. So when we look at the world map, forgetting the superpowers, we see an incredible amount of damage, grief, and suffering. As it stands now, all of it would be absorbed, even with the radiation effects.”

Harpoon shifted impatiently from one foot to the other. “Okay, general, the superpowers?”

“Well, you look at those maps . . .” The general let out a large whoosh of air. “You look at those maps and you see a considerably different picture. Both nations would survive what you see here. I'd also add—pardon me, admiral, but it is worth noting—that the world has suffered similar catastrophes, even worse. In the fourteenth century, when the world's population was a fraction of what it is now, bubonic-plague outbreaks claimed twenty-five million lives in just a few years in Europe and Asia. In this century, the flu epidemic of 1918 killed three times as many as World War One—probably thirty million persons. However—”

“It would be valuable to recall,” the colonel interrupted, gazing knowingly over his spectacles, “that the Soviet Union accepted fatalities of twenty million during World War Two. Such is their nature.”

“Bullshit!” All heads turned toward Harpoon. He slammed his light pointer onto the table.

“Admiral,” the colonel protested. “It is historical fact.”

“Bullshit!” Harpoon erupted again. “I've been hearing this crap since I was a plebe at Annapolis and I'm sick of it. The historical fact is that twenty million Russians died. The historical bullshit is to say it is in their nature to accept it.”

The colonel looked away unhappily. The successor glanced first at the colonel and then at Harpoon questioningly. “I must say, Harpoon,” the man said quietly, “that I seriously doubt the Soviets have the same respect for human life that we do. You disagree?”

“I am saying, sir, that it does us no good to view our adversary as some sort of subhuman species. It is misleading and dangerous. They are our enemy. But they lose loved ones and they mourn just like us. To view them differently not only gets us nowhere, it leads us in the wrong direction. Would you proceed, general?”

The general glanced quickly from the successor to the admiral. He continued.

“However, there is no way to make a comparison between this event and the worst of past disasters. Unlike previous wars, the deaths occurred almost simultaneously over large sections of the two countries. Unlike the largest epidemics, it was accompanied by vast physical destruction. And this event occurred in complex societies which will find it much more difficult to adjust than, say, the agrarian society of China a century ago. The lifeblood of these technological societies—oil, communications, interrelated economic systems—has been destroyed or severely impaired for years or decades.

“Also, it is impossible to calculate the effect that fear of the unknown—particularly radiation—will have on surviving populations. In that regard, we are as primitive as the Dark Ages populations trying to deal with fear of the plague. In those times, terrified families left loved ones to die alone. They ran, panicked, looted, murdered, raped, committed suicide, and rebelled against authorities who often were as fearful as the populace. Radiation, like the plague, is an unseen, unknown menace—”

Harpoon tapped his pointer impatiently. “So, general, please, what kind of society do we have below us if we stop now? Briefly. Speculatively, if necessary.”

“It's all speculative,” the general protested. But he went on, trying to condense the knowledge he had accumulated over years. “If we stopped now”—and he paused emphatically with doubt— “we have the world's two most powerful nations set back anywhere from several years to several decades.

“We have the world's two superpowers reduced to second-rank powers, perhaps on the level of a Brazil, with their only real influence resting in the threat of their remaining nuclear weapons. That is not a small influence. But we can expect world turmoil, as other countries try to fill the power void. Economies will collapse everywhere. Starvation will be common before spring throughout the United States, the Soviet Union, and the world. Some areas of the United States and the Soviet Union will not be habitable for a century or more. I am not an alarmist on radiation effects. It does not mean the end of the world. But millions more will die, even if we stop, and still further millions will perish from medical epidemics of a nonnuclear nature, from hunger and from civil disorder.

“Allow me just one example. We had more than one thousand intercontinental missiles buried primarily in the Plains states from Montana, Wyoming, and the Dakotas to Missouri and Arkansas. The Soviets had even more in the central regions of their country. Most were double-targeted. The only way to destroy those missile installations is with direct-hit ground bursts of fairly large mega-tonnage, digging them out in the craters. Such explosions cause the most intensive radiation damage, the dirt from the craters pulverized and kicked into the atmosphere as fallout. In one of our complexes, we had two hundred silos scattered in a hundred-mile radius around Great Falls, Montana. That area alone, according to our preliminary data, received at least three hundred ground-burst explosions in the one-megaton range. The area is so radioactive that men will be unable to live there for at least a century. The area contained the headwaters of the Missouri River, which feeds into the Mississippi. Worse, far worse, the fallout from those detonations plus others throughout the region naturally wafts east on the prevailing winds. It will drop most heavily on the breakbasket regions of the Midwest, the richest farmlands in the world. Crops will grow again there, but certainly not this year. This will cause starvation throughout the nation and probably the world. Ironically, even the Soviets depended on this breadbasket to feed their people.”

The general paused.

“Still, to be an optimist, the United States would survive. The Soviet Union would survive. Neither would survive comfortably.” The general stopped uncertainly.

“Thank you, general,” Harpoon said quietly. “And if this war continues?”

The general's face paled immediately and he snapped his eyes at Harpoon.

Kazaklis glanced at his altimeter. It was spinning. Thirty-seven thousand feet, thirty-six, thirty-five. Moreau, without orders, had begun taking the plane down. Smart little wench. The pilot's stomach was falling up again. He liked the feeling. In front of him, on the red television screen, he could see the MIG's climbing, desperately trying to slow down. They disappeared off the top of his screen. Other white images remained, moving rapidly toward him. Then others appeared, diving on the aircraft.

“New missile launches!” Radnor's voice was losing its artificial calmness. “One! Two! Four missile launches!”

“Radar-guided missiles approaching!” Kazaklis barked. “More chaff!” Alone, in the back of the upstairs cabin, Halupalai dumped more tinfoil. His palms sweated. One hand lurched again at the gun trigger, the other closing over the ejection lever. He swore at himself again for his inability to break the habit. The Buff groaned in its sweeping dive through the fallout cloud. Moreau began rocking the aircraft in evasion.

The first white intrusions were almost upon them. The plane rocked rhythmically. On Halupalai's screen the first blip poofed. Then the next and the next in rapid order. Halupalai felt the airframe shudder ever so slightly. Briefly the gunner was puzzled. Then he saw the last of the first intruders dart left, suckering into the phony heat of his decoy flare—poof!—and he let out a wild whoop. “Hot shit!”

“Hang on to your muumuu back there, ace,” Kazaklis drawled. “Four more coming.”

Halupalai's exuberance faded instantly. His screen was a clutter now of radioactivity and dancing snow from his tinfoil patterns. The four images sped raggedly at him through the snow. Suddenly they broke crazily away, skittering randomly after the tinfoil ghosts he had created. He sagged back into his bucket seat.

“Let 'er rip now, gunner,” Kazaklis exulted. “You just made it to the Super Bowl.”

“Hot shit,” Halupalai said without enthusiasm.

Up front, Kazaklis and Moreau looked at each other. Kazaklis shrugged. They still had four MIG's out there, with six missiles and a handful of other ways to stop them.

The pilot forgot Halupalai immediately. The Russian pilots had made the first mistake. But they could afford mistakes. He could not. He glanced at the altimeter—ten thousand feet, nine thousand, eight thousand—and then at his screen, on which the Arctic Coast crept back toward them. The fog was gone, the fallout cloud behind them. Kazaklis leaned forward and pulled the flash curtain open at its corner. Below him, starlight shimmered off ice and snow. He felt the tension surge into him, the silver captain's bars rise on his shoulders, the Strategic Air Command lightning bolt stretch tightly on his arm. The percentages were not good. But they were better where he was going. He was not depressed at all. He was going down to low level, where he liked it, where he could take those bastards up against the canyon wall. “I'll take it now,” the pilot told Moreau.

“Dammit, admiral, I don't know how to answer that,” the general said.

“The hell you don't. We've been studying it for years.”

“And all we came up with is imponderables.”

“Bullshit. Just plain bullshit. Just because we don't know precisely what happens to the F1 level of the ionosphere as opposed to the F2 level doesn't mean a damn now. Just because we didn't tell the public diddly-squat about it doesn't mean we don't know a lot about it. Tell him what General Jones told Congress.”

“Christ, anybody could figure that out. I don't know why people were surprised.”

“Start there.”

“General Jones, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs late in the Carter administration and early in the Reagan years, testified in 1980 that if both countries emptied the whole shooting gallery . . .”

The general stopped.

“Come on,” Harpoon pushed. “Get on with it.”

“He testified that the deaths in the northern hemisphere would be in the hundreds of millions.”

The successor sat rigidly watching. His face had paled. He felt as if he had been spun up and down like a yo-yo since boarding this plane. This is not what he had planned during his trek through Louisiana. Off to his side the director of Fish and Wildlife, who had not uttered a word since takeoff, sweated like a lathered quarter horse. The remaining Secret Service agent stood with his legs crossed, as if he were faced with a problem of imminent bodily evacuation.

“Thank you,” Harpoon said. “Now, go on.”