Trinity's Child (44 page)

Kazaklis said nothing for a moment. He was tired. He had been trying to hold this plane together—this crew together—for more than six hours. He peered around the side of his helmet, peekaboo style. “My backside, maybe?” he asked impishly.

Moreau lunged at him in her fury, pounding her fists into his shoulder. “Stop it, damn you!”

Kazaklis took it for a second, then pushed her back gently but firmly. “Fuel load?” he asked professionally.

“Two hundred one thousand pounds,” she replied, equally professionally.

“Weapons load?”

“Just under twenty thousand pounds.”

“We have to jettison the weapons.”

“Yes.”

Kazaklis quickly ran the numbers through his head. By flying upstairs instead of down in the weeds, they would gain a thirty-five-percent fuel saving. If they didn't push it, if they cruised at an optimum altitude of forty thousand feet or higher, they would burn twenty thousand pounds of fuel an hour. Dumping the bombs—the three of them were the only payload worth carrying now—and eliminating the drag from the missiles tucked under their wings would give them still more efficiency. With a few breaks they could stay up ten, eleven, twelve hours. This old brute still had at least six thousand miles in it.

“Where are we?” Kazaklis asked.

“Navigation isn't our strong point.”

“We'll make do. Halupalai wouldn't last ten minutes down in that pit. It's an Edgar Allan Poe horror story.”

“I know.”

“So where are we? You been drivin', lady. I saw a peninsula and an island before I came up.”

“South of Anchorage. What was Anchorage. They sure didn't want interceptors coming at them from the Alaskan Air Command.”

“Neither do we, pal. Only favor the cossacks did for us.”

“Yeah. Some favor. It's the Kenai Peninsula, with Kodiak Island coming up.”

Kazaklis didn't bother with a map. Like every B-52 crewman since the fifties, he had played this game with the same fervor that an English pubgoer played darts. He had the board memorized, all its fanciful targets etched in his head. Not once had he taken it seriously. But he could draw the circle in his mind, each degree of latitude another seventy miles south. From Kodiak, at fifty-eight degrees, the equator lay four thousand miles distant. Tahiti, Moreau's once-prankish fantasy island, lay 1,250 miles beyond, almost due south of their present position. Tonga, Fiji, and a thousand islands of a thousand dead fantasies lay inside the arc.

The engine roar had become a purr now, its roar their silence. They let the silence sit. Then Kazaklis looked at Moreau, her face moon-framed in its white helmet, the stress lines washed out by the night-light red, the nuked eye appearing natural now.

“Having doubts?” she asked.

“No,” he replied, then checked himself. “Sure I am, Moreau. I was just thinking that our world is dying out there and we haven't seen a thing, haven't heard a thing, don't have the foggiest notion why, and probably never will. Yet we were the killers. We saw a couple of MIG's, dropped a bomb in the wilderness, had our own little civil war. But even if we had gone, we wouldn't have been part of the world's agony. We wouldn't have seen any more, known any more.”

“We weren't supposed to, Kazaklis. That's why people like us could do it.”

“Maybe. I'm not so sure. We humans can be a mean bunch of critters. Give us a creed—any creed—and we'll shove people with other creeds into ovens. I guess that was our special talent—building bigger and better ovens. Till we finally built one big enough for all of us.”

The purr filled the cockpit again, both of them staring into the mesmerizing maze of their flight panel.

Kazaklis felt awkward and he suddenly switched the radio from private to all stations. “Hokay, mutineers!” he whooped flamboyantly. “Rarotonga! Bora Bora! Hiva Oa! Papeete for the lady! We're goin' for the blue lagoon! Sound okay to you, Halupalai?!”

Only a low grunt came from the rear. Moreau turned worriedly toward Kazaklis and asked privately, “Where are we really going?”

Kazaklis shot a worried look back. “I'm not sure.”

She looked at him curiously. “You're going to fly over Hawaii, aren't you?”

“It's a natural navigational pivot point,” Kazaklis answered, much too quickly.

“Pivot point, my ass,” Moreau said quietly.

“We have to see it, Moreau.”

“Him too?” Moreau asked a trifle aggressively as she motioned toward the back.

Kazaklis stared straight ahead. “All of us. We can't live in some other world without seeing why we had to leave. We'd be nuts in a month. He wouldn't last a week.” Kazaklis sounded very certain.

“You know what it will look like.”

“Yes.”

They flew on silently for several moments, the engine roar filling their voids.

“He already asked,” Moreau broke the silence.

Kazaklis turned on her abruptly, a strange look in his eyes.

“I said maybe,” she answered defensively. “He was coming apart at the seams. I didn't want four people stacked downstairs.” She paused. “Maybe five. What
were
you doing down there?”

Kazaklis allowed a faint smile to cross his face. “Sleepin',” he drawled.

“You sonuvabitch,” Moreau said. “Kazaklis, you are the most hopeless person I've ever met.”

“Yeah,” he acknowledged. “But I may have met my match.”

The persistent rapping startled Harpoon, his mind having drifted so far away. Out of ingrained habit he leaned over in his chair, used the forearm of his starched white shirt to do a quick buff of his shit-polish shine, and then rose quickly. At the door he was greeted by the fat man whom he had pulled aboard with Condor in the chaos of Baton Rouge. The man still sweated profusely, as if he had jogged on this errand, and the turquoise belt buckle was loosened to make more room for his heaving stomach.

“The President would like to see you,” the man wheezed.

“Why, of course,” Harpoon replied, surprised but curious. He reached for the jacket he had draped so neatly over a second chair.

“You won't need that,” the man said, and Harpoon shrugged, left the coat, and followed him into the hallway. They walked, not quite briskly enough for the admiral, up the spiral staircase and into the presidential quarters. Inside, Condor and the Librarian sat talking intently. The blank-faced Secret Service agent lingered in the background, still cradling his Uzi.

Harpoon drew his shoulders back smartly and snapped a salute. “Sir!” he said.

“Admiral,” the successor acknowledged. He did not invite him to sit down. “We got ourselves a situation here. Need a little more information on our naval forces. Colonel says we got nukes floatin' all over the place.”

“That's true, sir. Most of the surface fleet is equipped with both nuclear and conventional weapons. Everything from surface-to-surface missiles to depth charges. You name it. Both fleets, ours and the Soviet.”

“What they doin' out there now?”

Harpoon's brow furrowed. “Jockeying, I imagine. I wouldn't want to be in a surface ship now. They're just no match for the submarines.”

“What kind of orders they under?”

“General orders. Respond if attacked. Take out any enemy vessels they can find. Especially submarines. They won't get many. I imagine they're trying to stay alive to see if the situation settles. If they've got any sense, they've scattered. We debated that a lot. Navy likes to cluster to protect the carriers. With nukes, that doesn't work very well.”

“And we can't talk with them?”

“It would be disastrous, sir. They're sitting ducks. It would bring in the attack subs like sharks.”

“Can they hear us?”

Harpoon was growing confused. “I can't imagine what we would want to tell them at the moment. They know what hap
pened. Their cut of the pie, their operating space, is very small. Even the carriers.”

“Dammit, Harpoon, just answer the question.” Until now, the successor had not turned to look at the admiral. His head swiveled toward Harpoon, eyes blazing. “Can they hear us?”

Harpoon stared back, perplexed. What the devil was this man up to now? “Some vessels might pick up a satellite patch,” he answered warily. “It would be very hit-and-miss. I doubt they would answer, or even try, unless the situation were one of extremis.”

The successor turned away again. “Okay, enough of that,” he said, quickly dismissing the issue. “Can your friend Alice”—his voice had a ferocious bite on the words, your friend—“issue orders to the submarines?”

Harpoon looked at the colonel, who smiled thinly. What was this all about? The colonel knew most of these answers. “Any command post, including the
Looking Glass,
could serve as a communications relay,” Harpoon replied. “But the Air Force can't issue orders to the Navy. Ask for support, offer support, coordinate. But not order.”

“Even if he counterfeited the codes, so it seemed to come from me?”

Counterfeited? Now Harpoon's heart was racing. Something very big had happened. “I don't see how he could do that, sir,” the admiral flustered. But Harpoon did see how, with the bogus use of an authenticator card and access to other codes.

“Seems pretty good at doin' it with the Air Force,” the successor said venomously.

“My God, sir, what's going on?”

The successor ignored him. “Navy's got its own command planes over the Atlantic and Pacific?”

“TACAMO,” Harpoon responded in a whisper.

“They did get airborne?”

“Yes.”

“But we haven't talked to them.”

“No.”

“Don't think the Russians shot 'em down?”

Harpoon's mind was spinning. “Only if they were suicidal.
TACAMO's
the best link we have to the submarines. The Soviets know that. They also know that even if the SIOP orders didn't get through, the subs had a preexisting strike plan. They sail with standard contingency orders. I can't imagine the Soviets would want the submarines out there without their communications umbilical, firing at will and whim for days, weeks or months after an attack.”

The successor stared at him. “Now, Harpoon, I called you in for just one reason. You've been down in those submarines. You've been up in TACAMO planes. What would happen if the TACAMO planes got conflicting orders?”

The reality of what had occurred sizzled through Harpoon with an electric jolt. Alice had turned the B-52's. A surge of hope—and curiosity—filled him. “How did the Soviets respond?” he asked slowly.

“Answer me, Harpoon,” Condor commanded.

Harpoon tilted forward in amazement. “You can't even be considering that now, sir.” 

“Answer me.”

“Do you realize what the Soviets have done? Most of their bombers won't even get back. They don't have our range. They'll run out of fuel. The Soviets couldn't make their intentions clearer. Someone over there is talking
directly
to you.”

The Librarian cut in abruptly. “And signaling an incredible strategic error,” he said, his tone authoritative and confident. “It is now our entire submarine fleet versus their remaining ICBM's. It is the greatest shift in the strategic balance in the history of the cold war.”

“Cold war!” Harpoon gasped.

“Alice, through his treason, has built us the perfect mousetrap,” the Librarian said triumphantly, his eyes narrowing to slits behind his spectacles. “We now can win. Do you understand that word, admiral? Win.”

The successor angrily brushed the colonel into silence. He also motioned to the Secret Service agent, who half-reluctantly turned his gray Uzi on the admiral. Harpoon stared, dazed, into the snub-nosed barrel a dozen feet distant. A remote thought tugged at his mind but did not penetrate the crazy clutter of his emotions.

“What would happen if TACAMO got conflicting orders?” the successor asked once more.

Harpoon clipped off his words as if he were automated. “If both commands had the proper codes, they would be confused.

They would suspect the Soviets had spoofed one set. They would not know which. They would allow the original orders to stand.”

“That's all, admiral. You're dismissed.”

“Please, sir . . .” Harpoon's words wavered in a feeble, pitiable sound.

“Dismissed.”

Harpoon turned and shuffled slowly out. At the top of the staircase he gripped the railing for support, trying to force his mind to function properly. Random thoughts collided with random thoughts. He remembered his tour with the Joint Chiefs during the Watergate crisis, when the Defense Secretary had issued quiet instructions to report “unusual” orders from a presumably irrational President. He remembered reading years later that John Ehrlichman, seeking to end all his personal agony, and the national agony as well, had posed at the cockpit door of
Air Force One,
fighting down the urge to rush it and crash the plane. Harpoon took a single step toward his quarters. Then he pulled back and moved rapidly down the hallway toward the flight deck.

Kazaklis felt the final tiny lurch, the Buff seeming to waft airily free like a feather in the wind, the sensation more in his mind than in reality, as the third and last of the unarmed gravity bombs fell toward the Gulf of Alaska forty-four thousand feet below. One by one the yellow bomb-bay lights flashed off, the giant doors closing again. He began the procedure for scuttling the SRAM's, popping them harmlessly off the wings. He jettisoned one after another, the flow of the aircraft altering slightly as each disengaged and began its long downward tumble. On the sixth and last missile he hit the release mechanism a second time, then a third. “Dammit,” he muttered. “Shake loose.” For the next several minutes he rocked the aircraft, jiggering the release mechanism, finally trying unsuccessfully to fire the missile to get rid of it. Then he looked at Moreau and shrugged. She shrugged back. They trimmed the aircraft for the slight imbalance of one SRAM that refused to dislodge and flew on, the added weight and drag an irritant more than a problem on the long, uncertain journey ahead of them.