Trinity's Child (37 page)

“Oh, Kazaklis,” she murmured a moment later, “it was so easy.”

“Yeah,” he said softly.

“Would it be so easy on a city, too?”

“Yeah.” He sounded like a little boy lost.

The return of the successor startled Harpoon. He had cradled the phone moments earlier and drifted off into a melange of disconnected thoughts. He looked up, momentarily confused, and saw the Uzi first, then the professionally blank expression of the agent, then the unlined face of the successor, and finally the Cheshire-cat smile of the colonel.

“Need to send the orders, Harpoon,” the successor said.

“You've decided, sir.” It was not a question.

“History won't wait.”

Harpoon looked at the man sadly. “I hope history hears you.”

The man stared at Harpoon, uncomprehending again, not knowing whether to take umbrage.

“Be careful with the insults, admiral,” the colonel said. “It sounds like losing to me bothers you more than losing to the commies.”

Harpoon looked at the colonel without expression. “You're a fool,” he said calmly. “An incredibly dangerous fool.” The man's smug smile dissolved. He took a half-step toward Harpoon. Harpoon stood abruptly. The agent wobbled his Uzi between the two military men. “Why don't you put that away, sonny,” Harpoon said. “It isn't going to stop this riot.”

The successor looked on silently while Harpoon reached down and picked up the satchel he had carried out of the blue bunker in Omaha.

“Good luck, sir,” he said, and began to leave.

“You think I'll need it, Harpoon.” The man had no rancor and no question in his voice.

“Oh, yes, sir. We all needed it tonight. A very large dose of it.”

“Past tense?”

“Sorry, sir.”

“Where are you going?”

“To my quarters.”

“We need to lock you in?”

Harpoon paused thoughtfully. “I've fired all my weapons,” he said after a moment. The words had a strange ring, even to Harpoon. He turned to leave. The brittle words of the colonel interrupted him.

“Haven't you forgotten something, admiral?”

Harpoon cocked his head back at the group. The colonel was smiling again, as he gestured at the satchel.

“The card, admiral.”

Harpoon stopped, placing the satchel on the table, and opened it. He withdrew a blue-and-red plastic card, charge-plate size. He looked at it briefly. Across the top was a series of random letters and numbers. In the center, the card said: “
TOP SECRET CRYPTO. NSA
.” At the bottom it said: “
SEALED AUTHENTICATOR SYSTEM.”

“You'll need this,” Harpoon said, handing it to the successor. “Orders to the bombers must go through the
Looking Glass.
The code at the top will prove you are authentic. The colonel will give you the word codes.”

The successor looked briefly at the card, then raised his eyes to the admiral. “You really forget to give me this, Harpoon?”

Harpoon looked at the man but felt his eyes glaze. The disconnected thoughts, interrupted by the group's arrival, rattled erratically in dark crannies of his head again. If the earth falls in the wilderness, does it make a sound? Did a Beethoven ever make music, a Shakespeare poetry? Out of darkness, into darkness. If you deny the future its existence, did you exist? Chess is such a simple game. “I'm really not sure, sir,” Harpoon said, and walked away.

The
Looking Glass
general withdrew a pack of Pall Malls from their normal niche, a cubbyhole to the right of the red lockbox and below a small countdown clock no larger than a starter's watch. The cigarettes were a ritual. He smoked now only on
Looking Glass
nights, his wife frowned on it so. Each time he drew the duty, he conducted the preflight briefing, stopped at the vending machine en route to the runway bus, bought a single pack, and slipped it into his flight jacket. Aboard the aircraft he always placed the pack in the same cubbyhole, as if to hide them here, too. At the end of the eight-hour flight he conducted the debriefing, breaking cover by smoking one last cigarette on the ground, and then discarded the pack in a litter can before the drive home into the suburbs. The discarded pack invariably was three-quarters full.

The general took a single cigarette now, caressing it as he might a fine Havana, tapped it twice on the Top Secret papers in front of him, and snapped a match. The match's flare coincided with the flashing white light of the black phone. He stared at the phone, expecting its signal, and finished the ritualistic lighting of the cigarette as he lifted the receiver.

At first he heard nothing, which was unusual, so he said, “Alice here.”

The pause continued briefly and then he heard in a slightly awkward drawl: “Condor speakin'.”

“Day word?” Alice asked.

“Cottonmouth.”

“Command word?”

“Trinity.”

“Action word?”

“Jericho.”

“You have your card, sir?”

“I do.”

“In the upper-left-hand corner, you see a row of digits and letters. Please read the fourth from the left.” In front of him, near a tin-cup ashtray, Alice examined a small blue-and-red plastic card, charge-plate size.

“Seven.”

“In the right-hand corner, please read me the final three digits and/or letters.”

“Seven C Two.”

“C for what, sir?”

There was a pause and a slight grump. “Charlie.”

“On the second line from the top, please read me the middle sequence.”

“Six D Six Two.”

“D for what, sir?”

“Dawg, dammit. All you people waitin' on World War Four, Alice?”

Alice started to chuckle, then looked at the papers in front of him and lost the laugh. “You wish to issue order changes, sir?”

“Sure as hell do.”

“Harpoon gave you the signal code?”

“Harpoon's temporarily incapacitated.”

Alice took a long burning drag on his Pall Mall. “Sir?”

“Code's Two One Zebra. Zeee-bruh.”

“Repeating, Two One Zebra.”

“Yes.”

The general paused, catching his aide staring at him. Sam's eyebrows lifted. They had known it would be 21-Z, Harpoon telling Alice as much in the brief call earlier. Where the devil was Harpoon? The general felt uneasy. “Would you like some advice, sir?”

“Been gettin' plenty down here.”

Alice decided to ignore the warning. “I'm sure, sir. But the situation's fluid.”

“Fluid. Been everything else tonight. Might as well be fluid. What's that mean?”

“We found another eye, sir. That's three satellites now. Also received our first message from the ground. Garbled. But coded and scrambled. Means it's part of the system.”

“Where from?”

“Not sure, sir. Washington region.”

Now Condor paused. “That's good news,” he said after a second. “What's it got to do with Two One Zebra?”

“We're getting things back, sir. Slowly. I'd orbit and wait.”

“Wait.” The line was silent for a moment. “Don't see the point, Alice, but I'll ask the colonel.”

Alice sagged. The colonel, for Christ's sake?

The voice came back. “Colonel says they ain't got the gas for a loose fart, Alice. Wants to know the battle order.”

Alice didn't know how to answer. The baker's dozen had slipped from thirteen to eleven. Especially with satellite eyes and radio ears opening, even if it was no more than a blink and a peep so far, he was being more cautious than he had been with Harpoon. “Dallas Cowboys,” he finally said.

“What the hell's that mean?”

“This is all extremely sensitive, sir. Ask your aide.”

Alice could hear muffled talking on the other end. He pulled on the cigarette, dropping ashes on the papers beneath.

“Okay,” the voice said. “Implement Two One Zebra.”

“It'll take a few minutes, sir.”

“You stallin', Alice?” The voice bit. “Had just about enough of that tonight.”

“No, sir. We have to do a hand sort. Assignments. Priorities. Alternates. It's tight. I have to put them in orbit briefly, so none of them goes over the side.”

“Over the side?” The voice sounded suspicious.

“We're saying too much, sir. Out of listening range.”

“Okay.” Condor's words turned steely. “Now, you get your tail movin', Alice. I want this workin'. Fast. Hear?”

“Yes, sir,” Alice said. He also heard the phone click off. He felt Sam's eyes on him and looked up at his old friend.

“We got ourselves a new White House military aide,” the general said. “The Librarian.”

“You're kidding? Jesus, no wonder we got 21-Z.”

“Yes. Well, send out the orbit orders so we don't lose any of 'em in the weeds. Figuring this out is going to be like wrestling with Rubik's Cube.”

“The crews will think we're going nuts back here.”

The general looked at Sam. “Well?” He felt the cigarette burning his fingers and he snuffed it out in the tin tray. He turned his attention to the papers on his desk-console, brushing away the Pall Mall's fallen remnants. He glanced down the top sheet, his eyes stopping on:

Cherepovets
: Construction, 1977. Cover, Rybinsk Mining Works. Thirty-five miles southeast town Cherepovets; 240 miles north Moscow. Intelligence data: Primary relocation site (timing option one) Soviet Premier, Chief KGB, Minister Defense, Commanding General Soviet Rocket Forces, etc. Hardened at least 1,000 psi.

Okay, Alice in Wonderland, the general said to himself. Start there. He shook his head. The Librarian. Good grief.

Genocide was a twentieth-century word. That he knew. Immediately after the Second World War, at about the time of the Nuremberg trials of the Jew exterminators, they took the Greek root word
genos
and put it together with the Latin suffix
cida.
The word had been misused regularly ever since, man's technology having overtaken man's perversities before the word was conceived. They had no proper word now. Genocide meant the discriminate destruction of one genus of the species, not the indiscriminate destruction of the species itself. They should have a proper word for it. That bothered him. He struggled with proper prefixes for
cida.
Specicide? Humanuscide? Anthropocide? The little compartment to which he had withdrawn was very confining, the weight pressing on him. He stared at the single phone, feeling an abounding need to share his problem. There was no one to call. Except Alice. And Alice was busy doing whatever you call it. Then he realized that words were for the living, connectors between anthropoids, connectors between the past, the present, and the future. If it works, they won't need the word. If it doesn't work completely, someone else could figure it out. At some place like Nuremberg. Tierra del Fuego. That's it. They could figure it out in Tierra del Fuego. Harpoon felt very guilty. He closed his eyes.

* * *

Alice had problems. The first orders to the B-52's, briefly and tersely instructing them to orbit and hold, had gone out. Now he had most of his staff, including many whose expertise had no relationship whatsoever to their new assignment, working on the target changes. They struggled with the fuel loads and locations of the eleven remaining B-52's. They struggled with coordinates for the green dots. They struggled to arrange packages of dots for each aircraft, trying to keep the packages practical while pushing the practicalities to the limit. They struggled to assign priorities within each package—which dots were important enough for a direct bomb run, which were secondary enough to risk a looping shot with the highly accurate but less-powerful missiles. A few, such as the choice morsel he had assigned to
Polar Bear One,
were double-targeted with a bomb run by one aircraft and a missile launch by another. It was a given that not all the Buffs would get through.

It also was a given—and Alice wasted no thought on it now— that the intelligence reading was reasonably accurate. For almost two decades neither nation had dug anything larger than a well without an electronic eye watching. The ruses—this one's a mine, that one's a waste-storage facility—had been unraveled by spies and dissidents in both countries. Who would go where and under what circumstances had been the job of moles who had begun their burrowing a generation ago. There were few secrets, and no places to hide.

In a way, as he plodded through the special task he had taken on as a personal obligation to an old friend, Alice felt a profound sense of relief. This, after all, was the decision he had not wanted attached to his soul. And until Harpoon had swooped into Baton Rouge and rescued the man with the western drawl, it had been Alice's to make. One way or the other. Still . . .

Alice tapped his ruddy fingers on the set of targets he had drawn up for
Polar Bear One.
Cherepovets plus five. A grand tour, sneaking in the Soviet back door and plunging at the heart plus a handful of major arteries.