Trinity's Child (39 page)

“What the hell is Two-One Zebra?” Kazaklis demanded in befuddled anger. “Where the hell is Cherepovets? And why the hell are we runnin' clean across Russia to bomb a friggin' mine?”

Moreau already had reached for the master book, through which she was flipping rapidly. But she sensed the answer and felt her despair plunge toward despondence. She stopped in a rarely studied appendix, read briefly, and let out a long, low whoosh of air. So it's come to this, she thought, and she turned almost in challenge on Kazaklis.

“Damn you, Moreau,” the pilot pushed her, “what's going on?”

“The grand tour,” she said evenly. “That's what's going on, Kazaklis. You were right. All over Russia, carving 'em out in the craters.”

Kazaklis stared at her. “Carving out what, Moreau?” he asked with a touch of hostile impatience. “What?”

“Not what,” the copilot replied evenly. “Who.” She turned back to the book. “Twenty-one—Precision nuclear bombardment, hardened emplacements.” She paused. “Zebra—Political-military infrastructure.” She turned the page, broke a plastic-tape seal intricately engraved with the faint outline of an eagle, and glanced hurriedly through contingency instructions they never before had been allowed to read. “Cherepovets (Rybinsk Mine)— Caution. This is not an opportunity target. Strike only on direct orders NCA. Relocation area, timing option one, Omega.”

Now the air whooshed out of the pilot. His gloved forefingers slowly tapped at the wheel. “Leadership bunkers,” he whispered. “So they really want us to go after the big banana.”

“More like somebody's gone bananas,” Moreau replied. “Somebody who didn't go to San Antonio for reliability training. Somebody who didn't read the suicide regs. The world suicide regs. They want us to get the leaders, Kazaklis. The only people who can turn this fucker off.” She stared hard into the pilot's face. “Request confirmation,” she said flatly.

Kazaklis lost his blank look and shot her a withering glance. “You just get promoted?” Moreau looked back at him stone-faced. He shrugged and motioned to Halupalai to send the brief confirmation request. Kazaklis felt his mind turn muddy. The message told him far more than he ever expected to learn. Timing option one confirmed what he already knew—the Soviets had started it. The orders themselves told him what he also had guessed—the pattern of bunker targets was stretched so thin it was obvious the B-52 fleet had been chewed to pieces on the ground. Soviet communications near zero. Both nations had used an EMP attack. Not surprising. Leningrad standing, Moscow partly destroyed. Mildly surprising. They had given him that information because he needed it to defend himself. But the
Looking Glass
also was telling him indirectly that major cities still stood in the United States as well. Otherwise the subs would have been ordered to clean out the Soviet cities.

But if it hadn't all gone in one spasm, if the war was progressing in stages as he would have expected, why were they getting orders like these? Moreau was right, damn her. This meant the end, the whole shooting match. Omega. Omega was a catch-all code. No holds barred.

Kazaklis felt woozy. They were asking a handful of Buffs to stab the king—and not wound him. That was taboo, drilled into them time and time again. The crews had joked sourly about it. Politicians protecting politicians while we nuke the folks. But the instructions had been explicit. If the boss gets caught in the office, so goes it. The Omahas and Cheyennes of Russia would go. But no overt political targets. No accidents, no stray runs, no open alternates, no targets of opportunity. We need somebody to talk to, the Air Force had drilled them. His mind spun. He didn't like this. He also didn't like her staring at him, probing him.

“You find a wart on my nose, Moreau?” he blustered.

“You know, Kazaklis,” she said.

Kazaklis fought back an involuntary shudder. He stuck his chin out. “I know it means we don't have to go in and drop a million tons of concentrated TNT on a bunch of kids, Moreau. Isn't that better, for God's sake?”

“You mean more satisfying?”

“Damn right it's more satisfying.” Kazaklis choked a gurgle out of his voice. The roiling, churning horror of the plume over the Richardsons flashed before his eyes, then quickly disappeared. “Maybe it'll get it over faster.”

She continued staring at him, her lip curling upward. “Faster,” she said.

“Damn you, Moreau.” Her face settled into a granite shield. “Moreau,” Kazaklis said plaintively, his voice taking on a low, painful whine. Behind him, Halupalai hovered again. He handed the pilot another brief message: “
CONFIRM TWO ONE ZEBRA, NCA
CODE HENHOUSE.
”

Kazaklis handed the message to Moreau. “Look up 'Henhouse.'”

Moreau did not bother to look at the message. She stared silently at Kazaklis, who returned her stare with uneasy stubbornness. The steady roar of the engines pounded at their ears in an escalating staccato—not a drone now but a racing pulse of explosive individual heartbeats. “They want us to vaporize the Premier, Kazaklis,” Moreau said steadily. “And the Presidium. And the head of the KGB, who controls the warheads. And the head of the Rocket Forces, who controls the missiles. Everybody with any control.”

Kazaklis stuck his chin out. “The bastards started it.”

“The bastards have to stop it. Nobody else can.”

“Look up 'Henhouse.'”

Moreau held her steady gaze on him silently. His eyes twitched and he tried to cover the sign of his uncertainty. His chin jutted out further. “You want us to nuke kids instead, huh?” he snapped.

She stared. Kazaklis began to bluster defensively.

“It always was a bunch of bullshit, leaving the leaders alone. Bunch of fucking politicians protecting another bunch of fucking politicians.” His voice cracked and he tried to cover it by blustering again. “Assholes. Sittin' down in their holes, flying around in their safe airplanes, pushing their fucking dominoes this way and that way over millions of people. Fuck 'em. They got us into this mess.”

“Somebody's got to be at the other end of the phone, Kazaklis.” Moreau's voice quavered now. She had spent her adult life trying to prove she belonged in this bomber, that macho wasn't just male.

“What fucking phone?” Kazaklis snapped. “You think they're talking to each other and sending out orders like this?”

“Leningrad's still standing,” Moreau said, her voice dropping off. “Moscow's partly standing. Something's still there. Somebody's back home to send out this insane crap. Somebody's over there to take it.”

Kazaklis turned away from her, staring into the flash curtains, the commander in him wrestling with the man who had reached to the curtain and stared into the face of a megaton meant for Irkutsk, who had murmured bye-bye, mamushka. “Look up 'Henhouse,'” he said.

“You know what comes next,” Moreau said, barely audibly. “Some poor spooked sucker of a second lieutenant lets the chemicals go in Europe. Unlooses the anthrax spores because he's scared. Some colonel in Korea sees a shadow in the night and fires every tactical missile he's got.” She sat silently for a moment, the engine sound torturing her. “Submarine commanders will roam around for days, weeks, months—popping one here, popping one there—until they just say screw it and let 240 warheads go at the commies in Nicaragua.”

Kazaklis exploded in frustration. “What the fuck do you want me to do? Write my congressman?”

“Till every last nuke is gone.” Moreau's voice seemed far off and ghostly now. “Every last biological spore.” She stopped again. “Nobody can turn it off after this. Not ever. Not before everything's gone.”

Kazaklis felt every muscle, every tendon, turn rigid. “Look up 'Henhouse,'” he said.

“No,” she said.

Kazaklis looked at her strangely. She stared straight ahead, not a muscle moving. He didn't know what to do. He felt cornered, trapped in a mad maze from which escape was impossible. His voice turned raw with agony. “It won't make any difference, Moreau.”

“I know.”

“Nothing will change. Somebody else will do it.”

“I know.”

“Cherepovets will go. Irkutsk will go. Ulan-Ude. Everything will go anyway.”

“I know.”

He paused. Her good eye seemed as distant as her bad. “New York, Coos Bay, everything in between,” he said slowly, pausing very briefly. “Steamboat Springs.”

The good eye glinted at the thought of her father. Then it glazed again. “I know,” she said quietly. “But I'm not going to do it. I can't.”

“Can't?”

“Won't.”

Kazaklis turned away from her, staring into the dirty gray ripples of the flash curtain. “You weren't going to Irkutsk, either,” he said, knowing that the decision had been forming well before the doomsday orders for the grand tour had arrived.

“They gave us too much time to think.”

“You'd have turned a Minuteman key in the first five minutes.” It wasn't a question.

“Yes.”

“Bitch,” he said. The ripples mocked him. He saw for the first time that the folds of the curtain were rank with dirt and crud, trapped off years of sweaty and eternally vigilant hands. His soul ached, as if he were deserting all those who had come before him, all those who had kept this aircraft poised and ready, all those who had believed. “Cunt.” His voice carried no emotion. He flexed a fireproofed hand, then reached forward and ran a gloved index finger down the grime of a generation. “Damn you.”

Kazaklis sank back in his seat, tightening his glove slowly into the mailed fist he wore on his shoulder, and suddenly pounded it, over and over again, into the crud of the curtain and the Plexiglas behind it. He stopped and looked again into her unmovable face.

“What do you want me to do?” he asked. “Shoot you? Eject you? Put you down on the ice?”

She stared ahead.

He reached behind his seat for his gray-green alert bag, pulling it forward into his lap. He tugged at the soiled glove, removing it. He placed his bare hand inside the bag, rummaging past the candy bars, the Russian money, the Chinese money, the first-aid kit, and the .45. He withdrew a small canister, roughly the size of an aspirin tin, and snapped it open. He handed its singular content to Moreau. She took it, looking at the white capsule without curiosity.
Melech hamafis.
She shifted out of her seat to go downstairs with O'Toole. She felt a hard hand on her wrist, twisting. The cyanide pill popped loose and rolled innocently into the darkness of the cabin. She turned and looked at Kazaklis. “That's one PRP violation too many, captain,” he said.

For a moment they were silent, the engines droning on, their drumbeat a drumroll now, Moreau poised halfway into the aisle-way.

“I can't go either,” Kazaklis finally said with neither passion nor sadness.

“I know,” Moreau said, and shifted back into her seat.

“Damn,” Kazaklis finally sobbed. “Damn, damn, damn.”

“So what's next?” Moreau asked quietly.

“I dunno,” Kazaklis replied emptily.

Kazaklis rummaged again through the alert bag, extracting a roll of medical tape. He tore two strips and attached them to the glove. He taped the glove to the red screen in front of him. All fingers were folded down except one.

“Up theirs,” he said. “Let 'em do their own killing.”

Then he began banking the aircraft out of the endless circle in which they had been flying. Moreau helped him.

Down below, Radnor felt the first almost imperceptible turning of the aircraft. He should have found that more unusual, because he had heard no request for course corrections and had not observed Halupalai bringing down order changes for Tyler's confirmation. But since the race with the MIG's, in which he had played no significant role, Radnor had retreated so deeply within himself that he had observed almost nothing. He quickly glanced sideways at Tyler, catching a camera-flick image of his crewmate's still-twisted face. Radnor just as quickly turned away. He did not want to see Tyler at all, so the young radar operator slipped easily back into the dismal swamp of his own private sadness. Had he looked closer he would have seen that Tyler's face had changed somewhat, that it had taken on a look of brutally raw anger. He also would have seen that Tyler was listening intently to someone else's conversation, his radio switch fixed to the private channel in use by someone upstairs.

The
Looking Glass
lurched left. Alice, who had been stretching in the aisle, lurched with it, his hand landing on Sam's drooping shoulder. He could feel the wetness seeping through the rumpled blue cotton of the colonel's shirt.

“Sorry, Sam,” he said. “Bumpy trip.”

Sam looked up, brushed his forehead, and nodded. “Smitty's really threading the needle tonight, isn't he? Ducking in and out of the clouds like a fighter pilot.”

“Let's hope he's just ducking.” The general smiled wanly. Sam said nothing. “All's well up north?”

Sam shrugged. “They all got the orders, sir. We sure had 'em automated.”

The general looked at him inquisitively. “How's that?”

“Only one asked for National Command Authority confirmation.”

“It's not required.”

“No.”

“Who asked?”

“Polar Bear One.”

The general's gaze drifted away from Sam, up the aisle of his wounded command plane. Kazaklis and Moreau. Figures.