Trinity's Child (40 page)

“Would you have asked, Sam?”

The colonel thought for a second, probing back into the youthful days when he had flown B-52's. “I don't know, general. Probably not.”

“I don't know either,” Alice said. “I'd sure as hell like to think I would.” The general clenched the colonel's shoulder in camaraderie and started to move away. “Think I'll take a look up front.”

“General,” the colonel called after him, “I think you were right about the Foxbats.”

“Sam?”

“We're picking up confirmed Soviet bomber sightings. They're coming in squadrons. Most of 'em are heading for the East Coast. But we got about fifteen Bisons coming straight at
Polar Bear.
The Foxbats had to be leading 'em in.”

Alice shook his head slightly. Small world. They can wave at each other on the way past. The bombers all had bigger fish to fry than each other. He moved up the aisle, patting shoulders as he went. He looked at his watch. The hands had moved past five
A.M
., Omaha time. But Omaha was a bit of an anachronism now, so his watch read 1110 Zulu. He wondered where they were. Knowing Smitty, he could make a pretty good guess. The pilot would have them over the safest place in the United States. And the last place any of them wanted to be. He pushed through the cockpit door, his eyes quickly adjusting to the red glow of the night lights. Smitty sat in the left-hand seat, staring at his radar screen. The copilot sat on the right. Unlike the B-52's, the
Looking Glass
had flash panels that fitted snugly into the cockpit windows, a peel-back patch about one foot square in the center. The silver panels flashed almost disco magenta in the strange light.

“You're handling this old 707 like an F-15, Smitty,” Alice said.

“Oh, hello, sir,” the pilot responded. “We've got some pretty hot clouds out there, general. How're things in the back of the bus?”

“Sweaty.”

“Found the boss, huh?”

“Yes, we found the boss.” Alice paused for a moment, staring into the panels. “Where are we, Smitty?”

The pilot hesitated.

“Over Omaha?”

“It's safest, general. The cloud is blowing east. And the really dirty clouds from the missile fields won't reach here for a few hours.”

The general paused again. Then he said. “Open the hole, Smitty.”

“You don't want to, general.”

“Open it.”

Reluctantly the pilot reached into his flight-jacket pocket and pulled out a black eyepatch. He fitted it snugly over his left eye, making sure the copilot had done the same. He handed another to the general.

“They aren't going to hit us again here,” Alice protested. “That's why you've got us over Omaha.”

“Just put it on, sir.” There was no give in the pilot's voice. Alice strapped the patch over one eye and the pilot slowly peeled back the opening, the Velcro sealers scratching through the engine hum like angry cat's claws.

Briefly the shimmer of a million stars brought goose bumps to the general's arms. It was so incredibly beautiful up here at night. Then he leaned over Smitty and peered down at the ground forty thousand feet below. His hands began shaking violently. Oh, God, Madge, I'm sorry. Below him, there was nothing but blackness. No lights. No landmarks. No movement of pinprick headlights. Miles away, in a near-perfect arc, orange flames still licked at the edge of the dark, empty circle. Beyond, sporadic fires burned in the prairies. Beyond the fires, not even a Nebraska farmhouse light shone. Even the snow was gone. The far horizon glowed slightly red and he knew it was not the sunrise. He felt a lump build in his throat. He remembered how much his wife had hated Omaha, with its hayseed social life and the isolation of its long winters. Suddenly he felt terribly embarrassed. Smitty's wife had been down there, too. And the copilot's.

“Close it up,” he said. Walking back through the main compartment, he couldn't look at Sam. Alice was pondering how many more cities, how many more wives, he had condemned to that.

Kazaklis took it on himself to inform the rest of the crew and, as commander of a now retreating strategic penetrator, decided it was best to do it face to face. He laid his helmet aside, adjusted the radio headset, and unsnapped the connector above him. With the radio wire hanging loosely, he pulled himself up from his seat, laid his hand on the copilot's shoulder, and edged his way down the short walkway toward Halupalai. He sat down in O'Toole's seat, and even before he made the radio attachment, Halupalai's baleful eyes told the commander that he already knew. There was no argument in them, just a bleak look of failure, and Kazaklis winced at his friend's discomfort.

“You done great, champ,” Kazaklis said weakly, placing his hand on the gunner's arm. The pilot groped for words, feeling as wretched as Halupalai looked. “There was no purpose in it, old buddy,” the pilot said plaintively. Halupalai's round face softened, as if to say he understood lack of purpose above all, and then he wordlessly gestured for Kazaklis to leave and tell the others.

The open hatch to the lower compartment lay just behind Halupalai's seat, and Kazaklis shuddered as he squinted down into the dark redness in search of a foothold on the ladder. Below him, he saw five legs. He drew in a deep breath and backed down the ladder, stepping over the pretzel twist of O'Toole's body, which had jammed forward into the back of the downstairs seats during the low-level race through the mountains. One of O'Toole's legs was bent at the knee between Radnor and Tyler. The other had wrapped itself formlessly around the far side of Tyler's seat. The discordant scene in the downstairs compartment was far worse than Kazaklis could have imagined, even considering the irrational radio conversations of the past five hours. The two small desktop workplaces, usually scrupulously neat, were a jumbled disarray of navigation papers, some bloodied, and broken pencils.

Neither of the two crew members seemed to notice the disarray, Radnor oblivious even to the pilot's presence and Tyler craning his neck to watch him suspiciously. Kazaklis stared at Tyler briefly and then pulled O'Toole back to his resting place facing the locked bomb bay. In the little alcove, temporarily out of Tyler's sight, Kazaklis leaned his forehead against the bulkhead and rubbed his eyes. Then he stepped back over the body, came around the corner, and knelt between the two men, attaching his radio wire.

“Tough down here, huh, guys?” Kazaklis asked, placing a hand on each man's knee. He felt Tyler's muscles tighten. Radnor felt as lifeless as O'Toole. Kazaklis cringed and struggled for the right words. But Tyler spoke first.

“I am EWO ready,” he said. His voice was eerily hollow—and menacing—as if it had been reinforced in an echo chamber. He firmly pushed the pilot's hand off his knee.

“I know you are,” Kazaklis said softly, trying to make the he soothing and convincing. “We were all EWO ready, nav. We've been EWO ready for a long time.” Kazaklis looked compassionately at his deranged crewman and then glanced briefly and mistakenly at the little Kodak icon above the navigator's console.

Suddenly an elbow ripped viciously into his rib cage and he bowled backward onto his rump, the radio wire whiplashing at his neck. He looked up groggily and saw Tyler place one hand over the photograph as if to hide Kazaklis from the boy instead of the boy from Kazaklis. The other hand darted at the pilot's radio wire, wrenching it out of its socket and pulling the headset painfully down behind his neck. Tyler jerked at the wire, then relaxed it, then jerked again.

“EEE . . . WOE . . . Red . . . dee!”
Tyler screamed hysterically over the roar of the engines, jerking the wire between each tortured and disconnected syllable.
“Ready! Ready! Now!”
The whiplash pain stunned Kazaklis and he shook his head in an attempt to free it as Tyler's becrazed outrage disintegrated into a jumble of unrelated mutterings:
on the racetrack . . . cottonmouth . . . Radnor's wife
...
At the mention of his wife, the young radar operator turned for the first time to look expressionlessly at the scene. He made no other move. Tyler screamed again. “Coward! Coward! Coward!” The words were a tearful wail now, but he jerked at the wire again, and again. Kazaklis, the pain searing at his neck, jammed a steel-plated flight boot into Tyler's shoulder. The pilot bolted upright, grabbed Tyler around the arms, and shook him violently. The navigator slammed his elbow into the pilot's ribs and Kazaklis struck him swiftly, a judo chop to the neck. Tyler slumped to the side.

Kazaklis slowly took a step back, the radio wire hanging from his neck like a loose noose. Radnor looked at him strangely but serenely, with the detachment of a man whose soul had taken leave for a more blissful place. He also quietly mouthed unheard words into the radio. Kazaklis took his hand and felt warm, wet blood. The pilot's taut body drooped. My God. EWO ready . . .

After a second, Kazaklis forlornly hooked the radio wire back into its socket. “We are not going, Radnor,” he said simply.

Radnor looked at him without chastisement, without any emotion at all. Kazaklis felt a deep, abiding heartache. Radnor was so young, so innocent, his wide eyes blank among a teenager's harvest of freckles.

“My wife was a cop, commander,” the boyish radar operator said tonelessly.

“I know, Radnor.” The despair in the little basement of his aircraft began to engulf Kazaklis. “A good one.”

“She protected us, commander.”

“I know she did, buddy. You should be proud of her.”

Radnor turned back toward his radar screen. “Who protected her?” he asked vacantly.

Kazaklis choked back the tears again. The red walls closed in on him. He wanted out. Badly.

“I dunno, Radnor,” he said. Then he turned and slowly climbed the ladder back upstairs. It was only after he had returned to his seat, avoiding Moreau's questioning look, that he realized that not even Halupalai had asked where they were going now.

He also realized that he hadn't asked himself.

The lights were simply intolerable, so bright, one in each eye, that it took him a fuzzy moment to realize how cold he was. In the background he could hear a pervasive whine. Air-conditioning equipment? Operating-room equipment? Oh, Christ, they had him on the table again. He struggled to remember what it was this time. But he was so cold. He panicked. So this is the way it felt. An icy hand doth taketh. The fear chipped away at the mind fog. Dammit, he had the best doctors in the world. He fluttered his eyes and fought it. The operating-room lights were so strong, moon strobes that bored through his eyes, closed or open. He groaned and felt a hand on his arm. “Doctor?”

“It's Sedgwick, sir,” a voice replied. “You've been out a very long time.”

“Sedgwick?” He didn't have a doctor named Sedgwick.

“Hang tough, sir. You really got clobbered.”

The President strained to see the man talking to him, but saw only the lights. He heard a distant popping noise. Far off. Much farther off than the chaotic clatter during the race across the South Lawn. Sedgwick. Oh, Jesus. Sedgwick! He tried to pull himself up, and the pain speared through his legs. He felt Sedgwick gently restrain him. He fought through the pain to focus his eyes on the young military aide, but the piercing lights blotted out everything.

“Where am I, Sedgwick?”

“I honest to God don't know, sir,” Sedgwick answered apologetically. “Somewhere in Maryland. Not that far from the city. We're down in some kind of gorge. You were very lucky.”

The President put his arm over his eyes. His mind felt rubbery, as it had toward the end in the White House, aboard the chopper. “The lights, Sedgwick,” he said desperately. “I don't understand the lights.”

“Lights, sir?” Except for the small hre, and the far-off glow of the burning city, their encampment was quite dark.

“The lights, dammit!” The President groaned in pain.

“Both your legs are broken, Mr. President.”

The President moaned again.

“I believe you watched the detonation, sir,” Sedgwick said softly. “I believe you are blind.”

The President shivered, but not from the cold. He remembered the full moon. He remembered it blooming, bursting. He remembered the rare beauty of it. Blind. . . . He started to whimper and pull deeper under the blankets. Then, abruptly, he steeled himself. “How long have we been here, Sedgwick?”

“Five hours, Mr. President.”

“We're near the city and it's not destroyed?”

“It's burning, sir. Took several small nukes, I believe. In and around the town. Andrews obviously. The Pentagon. I'm not sure what else.”

“But Washington's not destroyed?”

“I don't think so, sir. Or we'd be in more trouble out here.”

“You have to get me out of here, man. Do you understand?” The blurred words in the helicopter—
after our response to their attack on the Chinese
—now seemed tattooed in his brain, haunting in their new and awful clarity. “Do you understand how badly I screwed up?!” Then the blur began to return, the pain taking him again. “You
must
get me out . . .”

“I know, sir,” Sedgwick replied. “But I don't know quite how, Mr. President. Both my legs are broken, too.”